This is also my guess. It's really a bummer, and I'd report it to Apple but since it's nondeterministic I have no idea how to provide repro steps.

Maybe bad RAM flipping bits?

Edit: Nevermind, the contents are vastly changed. This is like a different stream of input got used, or a buffer was written over with contents from another image.

Interesting that he went from 30% failure to it taking a while to find a single failure after replacing everything.

Random is random, and random is clumpy, so maybe swapping parts is irrelevant, but... I wanted more detail how often the corruption happened throughout his replacement journey.

edit: also wth i just realized I went to "tenderlovemaking.com" at work. gross. lol.

What’s wild is that this kind of bug feels like something that should’ve been caught with even minimal end-to-end integrity checks

I wonder if it’s related to import sources, and maybe the speed of that hardware. They are still successfully importing the photos into the Photos app, just not from the camera.

Sounds like an argument for Apple to provide a new high-level media import framework?

Agreed. Proper troubleshooting technique takes into account not just just swapping out parts, but looking at likelihood and cost. Changing software is highly likely to solve the issue as well as being free and fast to check.

Yeah, after you've had this problem once it seems you'd uncheck delete after import before buying a literally entirely new photography system.

This is why Apple makes so much fucking money. Because Photos (non-compatibility with anything else) is the moat.

I too sometimes use troubleshooting as an excuse to get new hardware I had been meaning to upgrade to.

My first thought was “software troubleshooting is a lot cheaper than hardware troubleshooting!” Maybe the author isn’t bound by the same economic realities as some of us are accustomed to.

There is a very popular professional audio website called Gearspace that had a much spicier name for a long, long time.

https://gearspace.com/

https://www.reddit.com/r/audioengineering/comments/mftc0g/ge...

In the late 90s my then-wife was watching over my shoulder one day and saw the domain “freshmeat.net” pop up as a possible auto-completion in my address bar. She was justifiably suspicious until I showed her it was just a software distribution site.

As if "tender lovemaking" is so shocking?

Whaaa, you don't like tender lovemaking?

I feel like you are a type of person that self censors words such as "ass" or "pedophile" into "ahh" or "pdf file", respectively.

I’m old enough to remember arXiv being hosted by Los Alamos National Laboratory under the domain xxx.lanl.gov.

It’s understandable why they changed their name.

This reminds me of a flash games website from 2007. The domain was something like sogay.com. one time I had to spell it to my father. He asked if I'm sure before pressing enter lol

Site belongs to Aaron Patterson, one off the most prolific Ruby developers in the world.

Why? It's brilliant.

Never thought to suspect Photos itself

I used to see this when I had iCloud Photo Library turned on. It randomly corrupted old photos that were correct. It corrupted both photos taken on the iPhone and photos imported from a real camera.

I have since turned off iCloud Photo Library, downgraded iCloud (no longer needed so much storage), and started using fully open source photo management with flat files on disk.

You work in IT right? always backup

I am baffled by Apple's incompetence here. In the past years I've seen:

* iTunes/Music app randomly reassign my Album artwork, with different (incorrect) art showing up on different devices!

* Reminders app: shared reminder lists can end up with the name of a different list

* Ghost photos that are deleted from my phone, and come back later.

* Maps, when I say "navigate to $friend" set a route that ended in my own driveway.

To me, these bugs suggest a fundamental design flaw, perhaps they are using a simple Integer as an index rather than a UUID?

Or maybe the database schema are solid, but there's some sort of race condition in their synchronization frameworks and the data is getting scrambled in RAM?

Whatever it is, it's absolutely insane that in 2025 these kinds of bugs are happening.

I stopped using apple's notes app with an ipad pen after it lost 20 minutes of my handwritten notes when trying to sync them. (Which fits the theme of apple losing people's stuff.)

> Apple does a decent job of keeping my data safe...

How do you know? Why do you believe that they're competent on writing security code but not competent enough to write a general purpose app? Is there a different company culture applied to the latter?

This is a company that is trying to design away the concept of the file completely. Which leaves very little recourse in the way of workarounds or recovery when bad things happen.

It's worth saying their magic ability to sync everything across devices has basically ceased to exist at this point as well, and now I wonder if it ever did.

The software engineering standard at Apple has clearly tanked in the last decade, which is sad because the exact opposite appears to have happened to their hardware.

I got burned by Apple purposely corrupting my music library. I'm still salty about it.

> I’m a fan of the whole Apple ecosystem

Is that a necessary qualifier? I used to feel the same way, but on the outside it's gradually become a rarely believable pitch. Without having an iPhone and without having an Apple Watch, and without having already had them years ago, it just seems like I've sort of made the right choice with just mac over the years, and with the latest OS that's becoming just a tiny bit more questionable; their decision making with software seems sus.

I think of Apple as blessed and cursed by hubris. The same arrogance that lets them assert a design into the world on the belief that people will adopt it allows them to incapable of changing at the things they are bad or deplorable at.

Well put! But I think there's an interesting exception—APFS seems to be very reliable. It's been quite a few years since the very successful silent auto migration and it’s pretty quiet about it, which is a good thing for filesystems.

I would love to know if they even invest enough into QA resources. For a company like Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Amazon etc... I guess anything that qualifies as FAANG, I would prefer their QA departments be slightly overstaffed and that they do redundant testing than messing up with completely avoidable software issues. Sometimes the production bugs are embarrassingly obvious so much so it screams no QA team was involved.

Funnily, "data security" encompass both protecting it from undesired access (and stealing) but also from loss/corruption.

So they do a terrible job from a data security point of view;)

This is infuriating to me. I manually manage my music library and have for years. I buy the iPhone with the most storage so I can keep my entire library with me locally. This used to work great, but has degraded over the last decade. Now when I drag new music to my phone in iTunes nothing happens for minutes, and then if I get lucky it finally starts transferring, but some times nothing happens at all and I have to retry.

Recently when I load new music onto my phone I find that random unrelated album art has been mangled or switched with other albums from other artists. And some music, which exists on my phone's hard drive, is now greyed out and when clicked says "This item is not currently available in your country or region." I am considering switching back to a iPod with an upgraded drive and giving up on keeping music on my phone completely.

Dumb, slow, corrupt

That describes 2025 too

Well, it might even be a bad sector in RAM or SSD somewhere.

Though, considering the macOS 26, it’s likely the Photos app.

I ran into the same corruption issue without any sort of RAW images and without using OM camera. My partner was pissed at me, thinking it was my fault. But it turns out that Apple Photos is to blame!

> That's because my worry is corruption of the entire Library, which Photos stores as one gigantic opaque file/directory abomination. My .photoslibrary file is currently 70gb in size, and I'm terrified of what would happen if it becomes corrupted.

It's a folder that acts like a file.

Right click > Show Package Contents works, and there's an "originals" folder that should have all your photos in normal everyday files.

Photos uses sqlite. I came across this but haven't tried them yet. https://github.com/AndrewRathbun/iOS_Photos.sqlite_Queries

I had a similar issue recently. I used the Windows Photo app to import & delete photos from my iPhone. When it finished, I realized that a significant fraction of the photos had been corrupted. Not sure where in the pipeline it happened, or if they were already corrupted on the phone.

Yeah, that's one of the billion reasons I'm sticking to Android phones with gasp file managers and shock expandable storage via an SD card slot.

I never need to import anything when I can simply copy the data from the card.

> Not sure if related but importing images via image capture on mac to the disk of the mac gives you correct time when the photo was taken in the file (kind of important if it’s family photos).

Something related: exporting originals from Photos used to give the current timestamp back in Ventura, which annoyed me to no end.

They fixed that bug in either Sonoma or Sequoia (I jumped straight from Ventura to Sequoia).

> kind of important if it’s family photos

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.

I had this with some old photos but you can quickly rsync preserving metadata and then use exiftool to fill in the time and the whole thing will always work. After that I pasted it in Google Photos and it’s correctly in the timeline. Remarkable how easy this stuff is these days with LLM.

Bit of context. Deleting after import is unlikely to have zero'd out the data on the SD - so using photorec would have allowed them to quickly and easily recover their pictures from the SD card.

I am moving this direction, but for now as a redundancy purpose. Copied google take out into immich, who has its mountpoint use truenas iscsi backed by zfs. Zfs is set to take snapshots frequently.

> Just buy a new one it's so cheap anyway

Not a good idea, you are going to have piles and piles of SD cards that will be hard to manage, and you will burn through $$$.

That the workflow could be better does not really excuse the software corrupting the images. This is like the "you are holding it wrong" type excuse.

Yeah it really amused me that he went through tons of steps, buying lots of new hardware, etc before simply unchecking the delete images box.

Backups on the go. 2TB iCloud + wifi + sd card reader for iPhone.

No longer have to bring laptop or external drive along for backups

You can put your apple photos library on an external / network attached drive. Thats what I do, since my photo library has grown to ~300gb. And I'd much rather buy a hard drive than rent one from apple.

There's also the excellent osxphotos utility which can export / backup / migrate photos in and out of apple photos:

https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos

Immich.app, with their import from iCloud CLI command to seed it: https://github.com/simulot/immich-go#from-icloud-sub-command

I use and enjoy PhotoPrism. It's open source and self hosted. It has the map view. It accepts imports via WebDAV, or you can manage files completely manually without using the import feature.

It's strictly for looking and exploring old photos. It doesn't do photo editing (except metadata editing), nor do I expect it to.

I'm fond of digikam https://www.digikam.org/ it's simple enough for most users and has complex features for more advanced users its open source cross platform and doesn't do some weird rearranging of files so you can still use your file browser too.

Immich could solve what you are looking for. It supports wireless upload to the server, everything is stored locally and it has some neat additional features.

https://immich.app/

See if you can File->Duplicate Photo it first.

> iPhoto still works just fine

I wouldn't say that out loud. Apple's motto with software is move slow, break backwards compat anyway.

My read of the article is that they were importing photos from their camera to their laptop, so there's no phone involved anywhere here.

This would not surprise me. For whatever reason, ORF files from the TG-4 import fine, but CoreRAW doesn't handle the TG-6, so I need to either use RAW+JPEG or convert to DNG.

Image Capture did me dirty once. Macbook ran out of space while importing photos but it never stopped and kept on deleting photos from my iPhone. Lost 5K photos of a wedding... submitted a bug and hopefully it has been rectified.

I use PhotoSync for images which works (most of the time ;) ) automatically in the background. Once or twice a month I give it a kick to make sure...

For transferring photos from your Iphone to your Mac, you can also use the native Image Capture app.

I always wonder about the motivation behind these polished, high-quality programs on the App Store which are not open source, and also don't collect (much) data, neither have ads in them.

This article is about importing photos from an SD card to MacOS

Here you go!

  https://gist.github.com/tenderlove/25853f50ab46a58738ff2cc22d682f2b

There's a corrupted photo at the top of the article and the non corrupt version at the bottom, is that not enough?

Yeah, I would have been interested in the diff too.

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.

He switched out his laptop.

"I’ve not seen any file corruption when importing to Darktable, so I am convinced this is a problem with the Photos app."

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's a mistake no mater what application you're importing to, else we'll be graced with another blog post, "Darktable app Corrupts Photos"

Thanks dad.

> What's the purpose of RAW+jpg though? Seems rather redundant?

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.

Speed. It all comes down to speed.

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.

With SD cards relatively cheap I long thought about, why delete them at all. Just put them into a box after importing the images/when full. So you still have a physical backup.

I also use RAW+JPG. Latter part allows quick sharing without long post-processing, esp. for impatient friends.

If I'm going to share the photo to an album or something, I process the RAWs selectively.

Is this downvoted because of the last line i.e.

  What's the purpose of RAW+jpg though? Seems rather redundant?

I personally would not let device A to automatically delete files from device B while files are being copied from B to A.

My workflow is quite manual when bringing pictures in from camera to my MacBook.

- I simply take the SD Card from the camera and then use the SD Card reader on MacBook itself to copy the files (RAW + JPEG) into a working directory.

- Move just the JPEGs into Apple Photos library

- The ones which I think I can/should improve using RAW processing, are processed in DxO Photo Lab and exported to JPEG with a *_DXO.JPEG filename

- DXO Processed JPEGs are added to Apple Photos again. This time due to the naming scheme, the DXO processed JPEGs and camera baked JPEGs are next to each other which helps in quickly checking the results.

- Delete the camera baked JPEG once I am happy with DXO's output

Regarding...

  What's the purpose of RAW+jpg though? Seems rather redundant?

I only keep JPEGs in Apple Photos as all of my image library is backed up to iCloud and don't want that duplication.

RAW files get backed up to another SSD. Looking into a better backup for RAW files.

Also, since I switched recently to a camera which uses CFeB cards for best experience (but also has a SD card slot), the onboard SD Card reader on my MacBook will become useless for this once I get an external CFeB reader.

JPG so you can also see the default camera processing which might be work well from time to time. RAW in case it doesn't.

I don't know why this is downvoted.