The Apple Photos app sometimes corrupts images when importing from my camera. I just wanted to make a blog post about it in case anyone else runs into the problem. I’ve seen other references to this online, but most of the people gave up trying to fix it, and none of them went as far as I did to debug the issue.
I’ll try to describe the problem, and the things I’ve tried to do to fix it. But also note that I’ve (sort of) given up on the Photos app too. Since I can’t trust it to import photos from my camera, I switched to a different workflow.
Here is a screenshot of a corrupted image in the Photos app:
How I used to import images
I’ve got an OM System OM-1 camera. I used to shoot in RAW + jpg, then when I would import to Photos app, I would check the “delete photos after import” checkbox in order to empty the SD card. Turns out “delete after import” was a huge mistake.
Getting corrupted images
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 member’s wedding and took tons of photos. Apple 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. After I imported all of the wedding photos I noticed some of them were corrupted. Upon closer inspection, I found that it sometimes had corrupted the jpg, sometimes corrupted the RAW file, and sometimes both. Since I had been checking the “delete after import” box, I didn’t know if the images on the SD card were corrupted before importing or not. After all, the files had been deleted so there was no way to check.
I estimate I completely lost about 30% of the images I took that day.
Losing so many photos really rattled me, but I wanted to figure out the problem so I didn’t lose images in the future.
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