Corrupt files?

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dlkphoto

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I've now had several files that worked just fine when I imported them develop a square of white space and distortion on the image. I have no idea what this is or why it's happening. Thankfully it has yet to happen to any important images. Help! What is this?

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How are you viewing them when they look ok? If they look ok when they're first imported, it's probably the embedded jpeg preview that you're seeing. The file itself is likely corrupted long before it hits LR, usually from a dodgy card, card reader, cable, something like this.
 
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Actually the file imported fine. I know I had seen it in LR and it looked fine before. It was only when I recently opened LR that I noticed this one looked like this. It appears it's both the thumbnail and the original file that is damaged like that.
 
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I'd be seriously looking at backing up your hard drive then - it's possible that it's on its way out.
 
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I agree with Virginia. IRRC, the last time such a problem was presented it turned out to be a failing drive.

Don
 
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Well sometimes users appear to balk at such extreme advice, so I feel it helps to second such an opinion.

:)

Don
 
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I agree, but you know that's not what I meant.

Virginia :D
 
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Corrupt Files

I can't believe there are more people out there having the same problems. I get the same type of corruption. It happens randomly. The files that are now showing problems never did before. My assistant and I have been troubleshooting, talking to techs and going crazy. Message is off to Adobe and let's hope we can find a solution to the problem.
 
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I am having this problem as well. I'm almost positive these photos were perfectly fine before. Has anyone by any chance figured out a solution?
 
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I am also experiencing the problem. It is random and intermittent. I have trouble shot this problem extensively and found the problem occurs on several different drives. So it is highly unlikely it is a drive problem. Standard windows commands are used to copy the CF card to a hard drive so there's nothing getting in the middle to munge the images. The image are then imported from that directory in LR using import at current location.

Forgot to mention: I check the images with Canon DPP before doing anything with LR and the images are fine.

Since I am running mirrored drives, one that writable and one that is read only, my work around to this problem is to point LR to the read only drive. Since I have done that, I have not had a corrupted image.
 
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Guys, can you put in a bug report direct to Adobe on this one. It sounds like they need to look at this more carefully. It may be completely unrelated to Lightroom, but it needs checking into further. The more information you can provide, the better. Link is: Feature Request/Bug Report Form.
 
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dlkphoto said:
I've now had several files that worked just fine when I imported them develop a square of white space and distortion on the image. I have no idea what this is or why it's happening. Thankfully it has yet to happen to any important images. Help! What is this?
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This one will give Victoria's method a boost! (RAW + XMP)

Interestingly DLK, you wrote that on march 27th.

Why this date? Just because I recently found two images in my database with such a corruption (one being 5 stars as per Murphy's law). :frown: And I discovered it happened on march 27th as per the DNG date stamp (Auto-Write XMP on).

I had no time to look at the problem until now and immediately stopped using the older backup drive since then (I rotate two 5'' GB externals). As I was sure the problem replicated with the last backup, I plugged in the old one to recover from there. For now I just checked for the non 5 stars one, a photo of my grand son.

On this photo, the flaw is a corrupt line of seven pixels high going all across horizontally a little above the center of the image. It is a DNG. But looking at the backup drive, the images were NEF + XMP :!:

This remembered me of when I recently was getting rid of all those old XMPs to go for DNG only then erasing the NEFs and XMPs. So, I suspected the conversion was probably the culprit. I was wrong!

As I had a DNG, I just reimported the NEF + XMP at the same place to see what happen. In the import dialogue box, I increased the thumbnail preview to the max and saw no problem with the image. OK I said; I may have to think to join Victoria's camp. :?

But once imported in the library, the DNG and the NEF looked the same, both flawed. :frown:

So, is the problem be the DNG, the NEF or the XMP:?: Reinitializing the DNG did nothing and I do not know how to go back to the DNG as it was at import in this case. NEF + XMP gave the same problem BUT! I temporarily renamed the XMP and reimported the NEF now alone as an untouched pristine original.

OK, I lost all edits (not many) but the problem is not there any more! :D

Now you may think that the problem lies within the XMP aren't you? Me too. But I had to convince myself before comitting to the forum. So, I synchronized the DNG parameters to the NEF. Guess what? The stray line reappeared!

Definitely an XMP corruption problem in this case and a reason to bring back the endless RAW vs DNG debate. :twisted:

Will report back about my 5 stars image later. She is differently "corrupted". This is only two for now and the idea of revisiting over 11''' images is speechless. :shock:

Have a good day,
 
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Interesting discovery Denis! Well researched!
 
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Victoria Bampton said:
Interesting discovery Denis! Well researched!
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Do you have any idea on how to get back to the DNG as it was imported stripping all Lightroom work that followed? As I wrote above, "Reset" did not worked.

For this image, I still have my NEF to restart from. That may not be the case for the other 5 stars one tough... :roll:
 
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Denis, the free-standing Adobe DNG converter has an extract function. You should be able to export your original RAW file from the DNG using this. I haven't personally tested it, so I can't swear that it will work, particularly if there's something already foobar'd in the file. Working from a copy, can't hurt to try that.

For a few super important 5-star files, you could look at hand editing the XMP portion of the DNG, it's pretty much just a text block.
 
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I think I may have found the problem. I just started having the same problems and after digging around it seems to be my card reader. I just started using a card reader that I haven't used in over a year. A Lexar firewire one.

Only photos downloaded with that are becoming corrupt in LR. I've since heard others online saying a card reader gone bad can do this.
 
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Hello,
Are you using LR to download the images via the reader? Or are you using another method to download the images?
 
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