{"id":49337,"date":"2025-09-23T15:58:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-23T19:58:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=49337"},"modified":"2025-09-23T15:58:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-23T19:58:07","slug":"images-corrupted-when-importing-to-photos-app","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2025\/09\/23\/images-corrupted-when-importing-to-photos-app\/","title":{"rendered":"Images Corrupted When Importing to Photos.app"},"content":{"rendered":"

Aaron Patterson<\/a> (via Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n

I’m pretty sure I’d been getting corrupted images for a while, but it would only be 1 or 2 images out of thousands, so I thought nothing of it (it was probably my fault anyway, right?)<\/p>

But the problem really got me upset when last year I went to a family member’s wedding and took tons of photos.\nApple Photos combines RAW + jpg photos so you don’t have a bunch of duplicates, and when you view the images in the photos app, it just shows you the jpg version by default.\nAfter I imported all of the wedding photos I noticed some of them were corrupted.\nUpon closer inspection, I found that it sometimes had corrupted the jpg, sometimes corrupted the RAW file, and sometimes both.\nSince I had been checking the “delete after import” box, I didn’t know if the images on the SD card were corrupted before<\/em> importing or not.\nAfter all, the files had been deleted so there was no way to check.<\/p>

I estimate I completely lost about 30% of the images I took that day.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

I was worried this was somehow a hardware problem. Copying files seems so basic, I didn’t think there was any way a massively deployed app like Photos could fuck it up (especially since its main job is managing photo files). So, to narrow down the issue I changed out all of the hardware.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

However, after I got home from RailsConf and imported my photos, I found one corrupt image (the one above).\nI was able to verify that the image was not<\/em> corrupt on the SD card, so the camera was working fine (meaning I probably didn’t need to buy a new camera body at all).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It sounds like some sort of concurrency bug. It’s unclear to me whether the camera itself—which he seems to be using instead of a separate SD Card reader—is a factor, but the same setup worked when importing to Darktable<\/a> instead of Photos.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Aaron Patterson (via Hacker News): I’m pretty sure I’d been getting corrupted images for a while, but it would only be 1 or 2 images out of thousands, so I thought nothing of it (it was probably my fault anyway, right?)But the problem really got me upset when last year I went to a family […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"2025-09-23T19:58:09Z","apple_news_api_id":"9a306bd4-5560-4a29-ae87-0319db7ca325","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2025-09-23T19:58:09Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAD\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/w==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/AmjBr1FVgSimuhwMZ23yjJQ","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[131,800,2841,1321,1016,30,2598,2742,761,927,283],"class_list":["post-49337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-bug","tag-concurrency","tag-darktable","tag-data-integrity","tag-datacide","tag-mac","tag-macos-15-sequoia","tag-macos-tahoe-26","tag-microsd","tag-photos-app","tag-raw"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49337"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49337\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49338,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49337\/revisions\/49338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}