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Q
quidquomodo
Participant
July 27, 2012
Open for Voting

P: Photo integrity check

  • July 27, 2012
  • 18 replies
  • 1930 views

Lightroom currently has the possibility to search for missing photos, which is a very important function. Unfortunately this does not warn about the case where some photos are still present, but corrupted. Given the large amount of data stored on most computers, and the long storage time, this corruption is bound to happen sooner or later (such examples show up regularly on forums). The user therefore needs to be warned as early as possible so that corrective action can be taken (e.g. retrieve from backup) before it’s too late.

Proposition: implement an automatic photo integrity check.

One way of implementing this would be to calculate the checksum of photos on import for all file types (I understand this is already done for DNG s). The verification against checksum could be done either during the regular catalogue optimisation, or at the user’s demand in a way similar to the command ‘Library’>’Find Missing Photos’. This could be then saved into a temporary collection for review by the user.

Lightroom, make me feel confident that my photo collection is sound and safe.

    18 replies

    Show previous replies
    B
    Babar_e
    Known Participant
    November 15, 2012
    Really needs this
    Backing up the database isn't just enough, we need to trust our photos backup as well.
    First we need to compute a rawimagedigest for all the photo types
    It would be nice to store it into the metadata of all the photos. But storing it in the database only would already be a great step forward.
    Then we need to be able (as Rob said) to run a check and create a collection of all the corrupted images.
    That is the minimum.
    The bonus would be to provide a ui to recover these images from a back up.
    -Select image to recover
    -Point to the backup folder
    -Lightroom scan the folder and finds the backed up images
    -Lightroom check the rawimagedigest of these back ups
    -If rawimagedigest is Ok lightroom copy the back ups, to the original image location, and replace the original images. (LR would handle image name modification thanks to its database)
    -Lightroom update the copied image with the metadata stored in its database.
      areohbee
      areohbee
      Legend
      October 19, 2012
      As it stands, *if* Lightroom has to render a photo from raw data, it will pin a corruption badge to it, but some (most/all) of us would probably prefer to know about this immediately, before happening upon the image down the road... I would think that comprehensive detection (e.g. when backing up catalog) would be a good idea, as well as putting corrupt files detected in a collection and notifying user of the problem when encountered during normal use.

      Q
      quidquomodoAuthor
      Participant
      July 28, 2012
      If the recreation of previews provides a list of corrupted files, then the advantage of this method is: none. But I don't know whether the preview regeneration will provide such a list.

      If the recreation of previews doesn't provide a list of corrupted files, and instead requires manual visual inspection of each photo, then the advantage of this method is a lot of time saved.
      areohbee
      areohbee
      Legend
      July 28, 2012
      What are the advantages of this over recreation of previews?
      Q
      quidquomodoAuthor
      Participant
      July 28, 2012
      Hal P Anderson has recently highlighted the following link:
      http://dpbestflow.org/data-validation...
      It is possible to run the free DNG converter on folders containing raw files to check whether the conversion (and therefore the raw files health) is OK.

      Pros: it's currently the only way to check a large number of raw files.
      Cons: It can take a long time, requires disk space for the second copies, and is limited to raw files (no jpg or video).
      Q
      quidquomodoAuthor
      Participant
      July 28, 2012
      Could you please explain how this works? If one forces recreation of all the previews, does Lightroom – at the end of the process – provide a list of photos which are corrupted?

      In this case it may be doable for a one-off check. But as Rob says, it is not practical to rebuild previews weekly or even monthly for a 100,000 photo collection.
      areohbee
      areohbee
      Legend
      July 28, 2012
      It would be good not to have to re-render all photos from scratch, just for a quick integrity check.
      F
      FeedbackCommunityMember
      Inspiring
      July 28, 2012
      You pretty much have this if you force recreation of all your previews.
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