iphoto corrupting photos from iPhone while importing

I'm having the same problem, it seems to occur randomly. Additionally, iPhoto is frequently refusing to import video shot on the iPhone 4s, or corrupting it. It continues to play well on the device and usually shutting down iPhoto and rebooting the phone is sufficient to get an uncorrupted image across.

Not the usual slick approach I have come to expect from Apple.

+1 for me - I am having exactly the same issue with iPhone4S and iMac running all latest software - extremely annoying and have lost some good photos.

Photostream seems to work fine but of course no good for video

I am also having this problem and unfortunately lost a handful of precious family pictures in the process. I think two things need to be addressed. Apple needs to correct the bug. Second, and more importantly, I need to get my pictures back. Does anyone know how to revert this corruption in the photos?

I have an interesting observation. I have iCloud enable on my Mac and Windows PC. These corrupted images are corrupt in iCloud. However, when I view the thumbnails in windows explorer, the corruption is not present. If I then zoom on the windows explorer thumbnails (Ctrl + Up/Mouse Wheel Up), the thumbnails show the corruption.

So, it's almost as if whatever process windows uses to convert the images to thumbnails would revert the changes.

Does that make sense?

I'd say that the issue is deeper than that – as it began ocurring prior to iCloud, and also on macs (as well as windows). I have been using the 'image capture' app on the mac which imports the same photos free of corruption, and then add them to iPhoto. This gets around the issue.

I agree, iCloud isn't the problem. It's iPhoto.

But the strange thing is the thumbnail image was not corrupted. I unfortunately, did not have back ups of all my photos. I was hoping that there could be some way to revert the corruption. If you look at the metadata thumbnail, you should notice the image without corruption. It's just a hope to reverse this idiotic bug.

It's happening to me, and it's maddening. Has anyone reported this as a bug in Apple's Radar? When I import 30-50 photos, one or two are often corrupted with diagonal lines, like this:

If I reimport the photo, all is fine. Needless to say, I no longer have iPhoto delete my just-imported photos!

Odysseus, I've reported it to Apple. I'd suggest you do the same. Clearly enough people aren't reporting this as a bug--or it would've been fixed by now. Here's a link to report it:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphoto.html

You're not seeming exactly the same sort of corruption (the diagonal lines), are you? I've been in contact with someone at Apple about this.

I have the same image corruption problem, but with Image Capture. So this is not just an iPhoto issue. (In fact, often if an image is corrupted on import with Image Capture, I can then import the same image with iPhoto and get no corruption.)

I had this problem earlier, and I thought I'd submit a new post to explain what I've done to work around it.

My iPhoto library is very large and it had been upgraded through every iPhoto since 2005, and I think it was part of my problem.

So I created a brand new iPhoto library, then imported the raw images (right-click on the old iPhoto library and select 'show contents' to find the raw files) - then drag them into the iPhoto window.

I lost all my metadata doing this (comments, ratings, faces, etc), but in the end it was worth it, as it now appears I have a reliable, large (> 16,000 images and videos) library. I have had this for a couple of months now and no more photo corruption, and no more photos being randomly deleted.

Good luck to everyone with this problem, and some words of advice - back up your iphone to iCloud. That allowed me to recover my precious xmas day video that iPhoto deleted during its import.

Rebuilding with iPhoto Library Manager would have done the same for you, without losing the metadata or edit history, albums etc.

Regards

TD

Perhaps. It's unclear exactly how that product "rebuilds" the database. If it simply calls the iPhoto rebuild command (which is what I suspect), then it wouldn't have worked as I already tried that. Or if the corruption existed in the metadata (also a pretty good chance), then copying it may have copied the error.

That's why I chose the brute force method. If in doubt, get a larger hammer, I always say.

The iPhoto Library Manager rebuild function create's a new library based on data in the albumdata.xml file. Not everything will be brought over - no slideshows, books or calendars, for instance - but it should get all your albums and keywords back.

Because this process creates an entirely new library and leaves your old one untouched, it is non-destructive, and if you're not happy with the results you can simply return to your old one.

But if some of us are experiencing corruption where a photo is corrupted upon the first download but then can be downloaded successfully again by the same means, it's unlikely that the iPhoto database is corrupted, correct?

Yes, for me it appears to be a corruption problem that occurs during transfer (via Image Capture or iPhoto). I wouldn't have thought the integrity (or otherwise) of the iPhoto library would be relevant to this problem.