I’ve used Olympus cameras for over a decade. Well, the same camera to be honest, a PEN E-PM2. This has only appeared in the past couple of years.
I haven’t seen it on photos from my Canon EOS 80D yet, but I guess it’s time to change my workflow. And maybe OS.
Yes this argument is a bit unconvincing for me. Not saying Apple photos doesn't corrupt his files, but this is not real proper investigating either.
That said, the article does mention replacing basically all the hardware and still encountering the issue. FWIW, my personal experience with Apple software so far is that the usage expected for Average Joe is well tested and polished. But stepping outside of that, it's "Here be dragons" territory very quickly.
https://gist.github.com/tenderlove/25853f50ab46a58738ff2cc22d682f2b
I ran both files through xxd then diffed them. I've literally changed every piece of hardware (at no small cost). "premature to immediately blame Apple" seems a bit off.As far as I can tell:
- 0x7800 bytes were replaced at file offset 0x00aa0000
- 0x2200 bytes were replaced at file offset 0x00aa8000
I can't tell if the replacement data came from a different part of the file, or somewhere totally different. Race condition somewhere sounds plausible.
The visible effect shown could be due to a change as small as a single bit flip. It also could be that large parts of the file got overwritten, or that it partially got zeroed. The exact kind of damage can help pinpoint the cause of the problem.
Photos does a lot of extra work on import (merging RAW+JPEG pairs, generating previews, database indexing, optional deletion), so my guess is a concurrency bug where a buffer gets reused or a file handle is closed before the copy finishes.
Rare, nondeterministic corruption fits the profile.
They constantly ask for an example project, even if it's something that is easily demonstrated, simply by running existing Apple software, and creating a project, would be a huge pain.
They also ignore reports. Very rarely, I may get a ping on one of my reports, asking me to verify that it was fixed in some release. Otherwise, there's no sign that they ever even read it.
I usually end up closing my bug reports and feature requests, after a few months, because I'm tired of looking at them.
It's clear that they consider every bug report to be a burden. That's a very strange stance, but then, they are not a typical company.
I guess you can't argue with the results, as they have a market value North of 3 trillion dollars, but that does not make it any less annoying.
I start my first day @ Apple in a few weeks, so I ACK that my opinion might be a little biased here.
(Yes, this came close to killing someone close to me. Fortunately someone else happened to come along to help.)
This was financed by equally massive technical debt.
From your description, your experience is quite typical.
Random is random, and random is clumpy, so maybe swapping parts is irrelevant, but... I wanted more detail on his parts-replacement journey.
He doesn't mention how often the corruption happened whilst he swapped out parts, unfortunately. Presumably it was too rare the entire journey.
I don’t even want to know what ZScaler thinks of “tender love making”.
C++ reference is one of these.
https://www.reddit.com/r/audioengineering/comments/mftc0g/ge...
https://cdfinder.de/blog/files/image_capture_bug.html
(I'm not sure whether this bug has been fixed or not yet, though I think it has been fixed.)
They finally recognized there is an issue, but there is no fix, as of a few weeks ago :(
I never need to import anything when I can simply copy the data from the card.
That's a mistake no mater what application you're importing to, else we'll be graced with another blog post, "Darktable app Corrupts Photos".
What's the purpose of RAW+jpg though? Seems rather redundant?
If I'm going to share the photo to an album or something, I process the RAWs selectively.
You get to keep out of camera jpg files. Some people might like how their camera processes jpg files and might also want the raw file for a scenario when a more complex editing is needed.
It sounds like Photos App can have issues trying to import both at the same time?
Thanks dad.
Processing RAW can be expensive time wise. If you’re sorting through a session of 10,000 photos, you want the speed that comes with the jpeg variant, which allows you to quickly sort out blurry, smeared, severely mis-exposed, and other various defect photos.
The storage cost is negligible (JPEG75@10MP is cheap) and the workflow benefit is immediate. Additionally, cropping and early white balance corrections (as well as a handful of other things) are much faster to preview with a non-RAW version of the image; since you’ll be processing that detail later anyway from scratch in the RAW later, it’s functionally free to do it on the jpeg version before you dig into the raw.
Additionally, there’s a cheap debugging aspect that you saw here: was it Apple Photos mishandling ORF? Was it something else? When working with both, you have a “reference” that can be used to make sure your digital development pipeline is set up correctly; finer details about the imager can sometimes get mangled by some RAW developers like pixel order and sub pixel blending. Not every CCD is a linear grid, not every LCD looks the same, but if you can get your RAW pipeline producing ≈the same as your camera did, it verifies that you have things mostly set up correctly.
Personally, I have seen a row of green pixels on the top or bottom + vertically flipped photos on import.
Good sleuthing!
Anything important should be kept inside the file. Filesystem metadata gets lost all the time, isn't consistent between operating systems, zipping up a folder and extracting it will probably mess up timestampts too.
But good gravy that troubleshooting path got expensive real fast. Replacing the laptop and the camera? Why not start by trying something other than Photos? It doesn’t even need to be a paid product; the Olympus software is free not to mention a good baseline since it - of all the applications - should be able to import photos without corrupting them.
Edit to add: delete on import seems pretty risky. My workflow is to import and only delete from the camera after 1) the imported photos are backed up 2) I’ve done a first pass culling.
tamimio•2h ago
actionfromafar•2h ago
tamimio•2h ago
https://github.com/LANDrop/LANDrop
I used it along with another called Localsend, but the later one gave me a bit of headache and crashed while transferring some large files last time I used it, but still great as an alternative too, and it’s open source as well.
Edit: Actually, you are correct, it seems they did close it! Try localsend instead.
BolexNOLA•1h ago
k8sToGo•1h ago
BolexNOLA•1h ago
basejumping•2h ago
ratg13•1h ago