• Global community
    • Language:
      • Deutsch
      • English
      • Español
      • Français
      • Português
  • 日本語コミュニティ
    Dedicated community for Japanese speakers
  • 한국 커뮤니티
    Dedicated community for Korean speakers
Exit
0

Images getting corrupted in Lightroom 4.2

New Here ,
Oct 13, 2012 Oct 13, 2012

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

I have experienced this aswell. As mentioned in:

http://forums.adobe.com/message/4138626

and http://forums.adobe.com/thread/948417?tstart=0

My lightroom has after two weeks of playing with a fully working raw file corrupted it.

This is what the photo looked like originally http://500px.com/photo/14737987

As of today, I tried to reexport it with a diffrent watermark, the raw file corrupted. It exports a corrupted jpg and when I delete the .xmp metadatafile and try to import it again (same happens with it now when trying to import it to photoshop) the raw file now renders as corrupted in all software.

broken.jpg

I have tried every possible way to reimport it, its just plain broken. If this should happen to my whole portfolio I would cry.

Views

16.9K

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
Oct 13, 2012 Oct 13, 2012

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

I suspect a hardware or preview issue. The other threads you quote have no answers from the OP's what their problem ended up being - deafening silence after other options than Lightroom were mentioned.

I suggest that you remove the file from Lightroom and if you have another copy, make a copy of the copy, rename it using the OS, place the copy in a test folder and import to Lightroom. What happens?

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
LEGEND ,
Oct 13, 2012 Oct 13, 2012

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

I'm in one of those threads, having had something similar happen to me in the past: my problem was unequivocally traced back to a failing hard drive, and every other such thread that has been followed up by someone suffering from this kind of corruption has confirmed hard drive, RAM or other hardware problems.

It's well-known that Lr stresses the kit pretty hard, which is probably why this corruption manifests itself when Lr is in use.

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
LEGEND ,
Oct 14, 2012 Oct 14, 2012

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

File was probably wonked when it got to Lightroom. Other softwares may have just displayed a jpeg preview. Lightroom "never" corrupts raw files - look for a hardware problem: card, reader, cable, ...

I'm not saying it's impossible, just *very* unlikely - so far zero of many such cases (that I know of, and I know of a lot) have been traced to Lightroom.

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
New Here ,
Oct 14, 2012 Oct 14, 2012

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

No the file was working perfectly well in Lightroom for about two weeks. When I was to reexport the file for like the 10th time, it corrupted, two weeks after import.

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
LEGEND ,
Oct 14, 2012 Oct 14, 2012

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

jinordnes wrote:

No the file was working perfectly well in Lightroom for about two weeks. When I was to reexport the file for like the 10th time, it corrupted, two weeks after import.

That is unusual. Still, I concur with the others here - if not corrupt going in, it was probably a disk problem or something... - Lightroom doesn't write to the raw files, so it corrupting them seems highly unlikely. consider a thorough disk check. Note: the look of the corruption is "signature" - like a bit was stuck or something...

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
Oct 14, 2012 Oct 14, 2012

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

I have also had this type of corruption twice in the past four years, which was caused by faulty ram.

Regards, Denis: iMac 27” mid-2015, macOS 11.7.10 Big Sur; 2TB SSD, 24 GB Ram, GPU 2 GB; LrC 12.5, Lr 6.5, PS 24.7,; ACR 15.5,; Camera OM-D E-M1

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
LEGEND ,
Oct 14, 2012 Oct 14, 2012

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

I would guess faulty ram would be more likely to corrupt DNG than (proprietary) RAW files (i.e. w/sidecars), since DNG files *are* being constantly written, but perhaps when ram is failing, all bets are off...

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
Oct 14, 2012 Oct 14, 2012

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

My experience was mainly a couple files with  corruption during import of a folder of files from a card reader. Copying the files to the hard drive then importing would solve the problem. I went through the process of switching, CF cards and card readers to try and get rid of the problem.

Eventually checking the ram and changing the faulty modules stopped the random corruption.

Regards, Denis: iMac 27” mid-2015, macOS 11.7.10 Big Sur; 2TB SSD, 24 GB Ram, GPU 2 GB; LrC 12.5, Lr 6.5, PS 24.7,; ACR 15.5,; Camera OM-D E-M1

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
LEGEND ,
Oct 14, 2012 Oct 14, 2012

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Ah - right. So, corruption during import may be due to faulty ram, but after import, (like in OP's case), less likely due to ram failure, I would guess. I can't help but think it more likely the result of a failing disk in the OP's case - I could be wrong...

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
LEGEND ,
Feb 16, 2013 Feb 16, 2013

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

DdeGannes wrote:

I have also had this type of corruption twice in the past four years, which was caused by faulty ram.

You are not the first person to report such, and you won't be the last. (not that it matters, but I have personally never had corrupt image files due to faulty ram. however I have had other files get corrupted before correcting ram problems).

Re-writing image data when hardware is failing can and *sometimes* will cause files to become corrupt. It doesn't take a computer engineering degree to know that (although I happen to have one).

I'm not about causing alarm, or trying to smear Adobe or Lightroom... - none of that. It's just how computers work, and people who are having problems with corrupt image files deserve to know about it.

PS - This has nothing to do with Lightroom - it's true of all apps that read and write files. The difference is that Lightroom may exercise ram that is not being exercised (at least not for anything critical) when other apps are saving files... Thus, if the problem only occurs as a result of editing files in Lightroom, it does not necessarily mean it's Lightroom's fault (somewhat counter-intuitively).

Cheers,
Rob

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
LEGEND ,
Feb 15, 2013 Feb 15, 2013

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

jinordnes wrote:

No the file was working perfectly well in Lightroom for about two weeks. When I was to reexport the file for like the 10th time, it corrupted, two weeks after import.

Please let us know whether you see this problem again after installing the new disk drive.

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
New Here ,
Oct 14, 2012 Oct 14, 2012

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

I have however bought another HD for my otherwise fairly new i7-comp. I will not take any more chances that this will happen again, luckily it happened to this photo which is nonimportat really and I have like 10 others still working from the same shoot.

I also do back up failry vigrously, but there is always a window of when my newest imported files are not backed up yet.

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Contributor ,
Oct 14, 2012 Oct 14, 2012

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Check your memory with memtest86+ ( http://www.memtest.org ). I had corrupted raw files due to a memory error.

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
LEGEND ,
Feb 15, 2013 Feb 15, 2013

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

janh1948 wrote:

Check your memory with memtest86+ ( http://www.memtest.org ). I had corrupted raw files due to a memory error.

That's what I use too, however it's worth noting that system bios has ram test built in (right: they are not as thorough as memtest86+). Such tests used to always be run at every boot, now they are optional, but definitely recommended if you are having inexplicable problems, especially if:

* Known good images are going bad, when the only access you've had to them is through Lightroom, and disk-check did not indicate any disk errors.

Rob

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Explorer ,
Oct 15, 2012 Oct 15, 2012

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

I agree with Rob. You probably have a harddisk error which prevents you from reading the raw file.

When you first have imported a raw file, Lightroom never writes anything to it again (unless you use Lightroom to move it). So Lightroom cannot suddenly corrupt that file.

Today's drives actually keep a log of functional errors and are willing to share this information with you if you ask them in a standardized way. Sometimes the harddisk even tells you its own estimation of expected remaining lifetime based on the errors which have happened. The standard is called S.M.A.R.T (from the silly acronyms department, I assume). So you should try a harddisk analysis tool which can extract the S.M.A.R.T. information from the drive and see what it says.

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Engaged ,
Jan 30, 2013 Jan 30, 2013

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Yea this problem is still present and were using Lightroom 4.3 and Camera Raw 7.3

Unfortunantly I don't think its a hardware issue as you would be having other graphics related issues... but to me it looks like a data basing error... If the images are fine on the disk then the problem is with the way the lightroom database is linking to the photo and loading the raw xmp look up value for that photo...

Unfortunatly I think this problem will alway be present because of upgrade incompatiblity... ie... if you upgrade lightroom but not the camera raw plugin or the other way around... What would be a cool fix is a way to re-connect all your photos and essentially clean up your database after you upgrade... Our problem was fixed when we re-imported the photo... But that can be a tetius processes, so some way of batching it would be really cool

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
LEGEND ,
Jan 31, 2013 Jan 31, 2013

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

What are you talking about, a “data basing error” related to an upgrade? Image data is not stored in a LR catalog database, only the settings for an image and nothing in the settings would produce the artifacts seen in the first post, which appears to have resulted from corrupted or probably missing raw data on the hard-drive, perhaps due to a failing hard-drive or iffy USB connection if it’s external.

Sure, the previews can get corrupted and things can be fixed by removing the previews folder and having them rebuild, which your removing and re-importing would be an unnecessarily drastic version of. Manually deleting the previews and doing a rebuild-all on them would be the batch way to fix them.

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Engaged ,
Feb 13, 2013 Feb 13, 2013

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Whoa! Chill out... I am talking about an error with the way Lightroom is linking to the file on the disk to load the image and then to load the look up values for that image... If you have a lightroom library that is fine then one day it goes bad the next but the file on the disk is good then yes its the previews that were corrupted... Which are connected to through the data base which is what probably corrupted them possibly when you updating your build or camera raw compatibility... Sure there are lots of ways data can be corrupted and people can be experiacing the same problem that are caused by different factors... Which is what seems to have happened here...

My photo was fine on the disk and the disk is an internal drive but it was corrupted in lightroom and looks exactly like the picture shown above... So do you really think my problem is hardware related? And if it was hardware related do you think the only place you would be experiancing problem would be in lightroom? Im sorry to say I disagree. I think the problem is what I said ealier which is with the way lightroom is connecting to everything. So thank you for the advice of removing the preview folders and having them rebuilt. But what is the best way to do that?

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Participant ,
Feb 13, 2013 Feb 13, 2013

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

I recommend checking your disk for errors.  Start > Run > CMD on XP or open CMD Window as an Administrator in Win7/8.  Then enter CHKDSK /F and reboot.  The drive will be checked for errors.  If you have any your drive is likely failing.

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Engaged ,
Feb 13, 2013 Feb 13, 2013

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Thank you... But I have checked the disk and its good... It was after I had upgraded the camera raw support that I started having problems... But with re-importing the images the problems are fixed and have not come back Thats why I think my problem was just some wierd glitch... I really should not have posted... I just thought it was interesting that two people were having the same problem caused by different factors...

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
Feb 14, 2013 Feb 14, 2013

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Bernard feel free to post problems, sounds like it could have been a bad connection possibly?? I still haven't seen Lightroom corrupt an image as all the image data is just read not written to whether DNG, raw, jpeg, etc.............. Now if there is a problem reading files it is alo=most always a hardware issue!

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
LEGEND ,
Feb 15, 2013 Feb 15, 2013

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Geoff the kiwi wrote:

...if there is a problem reading files it is alo=most always a hardware issue!

I agree.

Geoff the kiwi wrote:

...all the image data is just read not written to whether DNG, raw, jpeg, etc..............

That statement is incorrect.

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
LEGEND ,
Feb 14, 2013 Feb 14, 2013

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

xmp is kept at front of DNG & jpeg files. xmp block includes padding such that more xmp can be inserted without re-writing the file, until the pad's gone, then it re-writes the file in it's entirety with another pad, and the cycle repeats.

Thus bad ram can cause corruption to image data when xmp is being written, in all file types except proprietary raw.

PS - Having auto-write xmp enabled increases the odds of such corruption.

Rob

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
Feb 14, 2013 Feb 14, 2013

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

And you have seen corruption from this Rob?

Rob Cole wrote:

xmp is kept at front of DNG & jpeg files. xmp block includes padding such that more xmp can be inserted without re-writing the file, until the pad's gone, then it re-writes the file in it's entirety with another pad, and the cycle repeats.

Thus bad ram can cause corruption to image data when xmp is being written, in all file types except proprietary raw.

PS - Having auto-write xmp enabled increases the odds of such corruption.

Rob

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines