Elements Organizer rewrites metadata and corrupts HEIC photos

Elements Organizer v26.3

Windows 11 Pro, 25H2

I have encountered reproducible corruption of HEIC files associated with Adobe Elements Organizer 2026 on Windows.

Approximately 100 HEIC photographs became unreadable by Elements Organizer, Windows Photos, Apple devices, and OneDrive's web viewer. The files themselves remained approximately their original sizes, and ExifTool could still read much of their metadata.

Important: I have never used Organizer's File → Save Metadata to Files command. My normal Organizer usage with these photographs is limited primarily to facial recognition, identifying people, and correcting facial identifications. I have not intentionally modified Date Taken, comments, or keyword tags.

Reproducible automatic file modification

I performed a controlled test with a known-good HEIC file.

Before importing it into Elements Organizer:

SHA256: 84921CB42E48AA45C27EA8B9AB3A02A1031BB62C690C794C12D6BD57F542F5BA

After simply importing the file into Organizer, without editing or saving metadata:

SHA256: 87ADB8A9D964C3ACB462B96AE64A72138E281DEF464757558C9988D5882FE7C3

The file's Windows LastWriteTime also changed. Therefore Organizer is modifying the original HEIC during import even though no Save Metadata command is issued.

The resulting test file remained readable, demonstrating that the automatic rewrite does not always cause corruption.

Media Analysis, automatic facial analysis, and manually identifying/correcting a face were subsequently tested individually and did not cause another change to the file hash.

Analysis of corrupted HEIC files

I analyzed a batch of 98 corrupted HEIC files and a comparison batch of 143 readable HEIC files from the same photo collection.

All 98 corrupted files exhibited the same HEIF structural problem.

The affected files contain an Adobe Elements Organizer XMP metadata rewrite. During a metadata/XMP relocation, Organizer appears to incorrectly rewrite the HEIF iloc (Item Location Box).

In a representative corrupted file:

• The HEIF primary photograph was item 49.
• The iloc table no longer contained a location entry for item 49.
• An XMP/metadata item appeared twice in the iloc table.
• The old metadata area had been cleared/zeroed.
• A larger XMP block had been written into a second mdat block.
• The compressed HEVC photograph itself remained intact.

HEIF decoding consequently failed because the primary image item had no referenced compressed-data location.

Successful recovery confirms the failure mechanism

I repaired the affected files by correcting the erroneous iloc entry so that it again referenced the existing primary-image data.

All 98 of 98 corrupted HEIC files were successfully repaired and subsequently decoded normally.

No reconstruction or modification of the underlying HEVC photograph was necessary. This demonstrates that the image data had not been damaged; the corruption was in the HEIF container/item-location metadata.

Additional comparison

The 143 known-good HEIC files all retained valid primary-image iloc entries and decoded successfully.

Some HEIC files survive Organizer metadata rewriting, so the problem appears dependent upon the particular HEIF layout and/or the relocation of an XMP item when the new metadata exceeds its previous allocation.

A known-good HEIC subjected to multiple controlled Organizer metadata writes remained valid, showing that metadata writing itself does not universally trigger the defect.

Requested investigation

Please have the Elements engineering team investigate the HEIF iloc rewriting code used by Elements Organizer 2026 when XMP metadata is automatically written or relocated.

In particular, please investigate a possible indexing/item-ID error during XMP relocation that can cause an XMP item location to replace the primary-image item's iloc entry.

I can provide Adobe with:

• an original corrupted HEIC;
• the repaired version of the same HEIC;
• known-good HEIC files from the same collection;
• a batch of affected files exhibiting the same pattern;
• SHA-256 hashes from controlled before/after Organizer tests.

I would be happy to provide these files to the Elements engineering team for reproduction.

Attached is a corrupted HEIC file, and a repaired copy.