files appear to be unsupported or damaged

[YeldarbPrahs]

I'm synchronizing my LR files with my Hard Drive files.  I get an Import Results page that says:  Some import operations were not performed.  The files appear to be unsupported or damaged.  It then lists the files that could not be imported.  When I look at the files, some are .CR2 (Canon RAW) files, some are .TIF files, and some are .PSD files. 

I don't know when the problem originated, but I was able to open them earlier.  There are hundreds of files that cannot be read.

Windows 7; LR 4.4; Photoshop CS6

Help will be very much appreciated

[Sumit Singh]

Can you please check the files which were not imported in Lightroom in any other program.

[YeldarbPrahs]

They are not viewable in Windows Explorer or Bridge.  When I try to open them in PS CS6 I get the message:  "Could not complete your request because it is not the right kind of document."

[YeldarbPrahs]

Thanks for the reply.  Tried using IrfanView, and it gives an error message "Unknown file format, empty file or file not found!

Does anyone have any idea why, or how, these file got corrupted, and how I can get them back?

Thanks,

[THG_BO]

Hi,

first you should stop "working" on your disk. Make a backup of all your data to an external disk.

You can try to recover delete images ("backups") using recovery software (I used photorec).

I do not know a programm, that repairs broken images.

[THG_BO]

Hi,

There are limitations in lr with importing tiff. Not all comression methods are supported (zip is supported).

There are limitations with psd. You must store them with maximum campatibility.

CR2 should work, if you do not own the news canon camera...

You should open your files with some other raw/image viewer. You can use xnview or irfanview to do so.

[photographyprostudio]

Probably you buy new camera and recognise that your photo or photos are out of focus and i think this is the reason for this message. I buy also new camera and it happens to me. yu can check if setup your camera to save to types of formats. raw and jpg. as you can understand that the jpg file it is ok but if you see better your are out of focus. if also check the raw file in lightroom you can see also that is out of focus.if you tray in photoshop you have the same proplem but different message and file is damage.

[Tom Mackie]

The original question doesn't seem to be answered. I have been having this same issue with TIFF files that I have created from the RAW, when I try to export them as a JPG I get the same message. This is happening more and more now to the point of being annoying. Come on Adobe, correct these issues.

[scottwild]

I'm having the exact same issue. Hundreds if not thousands of images are coming up with the same message.

Not sure what has happened. Did you or anyone else on this thread figure this out? Please help!!!

[djharris69]

I'm having this same issue with both JPG and TIF files that Windows has no problem reading/viewing.

[dj_paige]

This thread was started 3 years ago. Maybe you could start from the beginning, explain your problem in detail, with screen captures if possible. Please be sure to provide the exact version NUMBER of Lightroom, the camera that took these photos, your operating system, and the exact unedited word-for-word error message.

[djharris69]

Sure. Except this 3 year old question was never answered but comes up near the top of a Google search.  There were multiple cameras involved and not all the failed imports came from my cameras and some even came from the web.  The original question has the same error and I get this is at the end of the import from within Lightroom, after telling it to synchronize folders.  I'm a creative cloud subscriber so I have the latest version but I'm not in front of my computer right now to tell you other than I remember it's some variation of CC 2015, and, according to the Adobe Creative Cloud manager, its "up to date."  The error is at the end of an import so I'll go through the entire failed import sequence and get screenshots for you but the error was also exported into a text file. The exported error message is what I searched for in google that led me to this question.

[djharris69]

Exact error message: The files appear to be unsupported or damaged. (123)

I believe (123) is the count.

Version:
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom CC

2015.6 Release Camera Raw 9.6

The import dialog:

Windows 10 sees it just fine:

The error dialog:

Same problem with many jpg and tif files.  In this particular case the tif came from a scanner and was scanned in 1999 but it can be read using Photoshop, just not Lightroom. 

All of these files can also be opened in Windows by other apps, including Preview, Photo Viewer, Paint, Photos, Snagit, Chrome and Office 2010 Picture Manager, Office 2016 One Note, ....

[ssprengel]

The initial post from 3 years ago seems to be dealing with a failing media where many image files are unreadable in many programs.

Your situation seems different, where only LR is having issues, no other programs.  I would guess that LR's import library doesn't support all JPG sub-sampling formats nor all of the TIF format variations.

If it is something in the header of the file then perhaps doing a lossless rotation and then back will rewrite the header without changing the pixel data.

If it is actually the encoding of the pixels that isn't understandable then about the only thing I can suggest is reading the photos in PS then resaving them and hopefully they work, then.  For the TIFs you would want to experiment with what compressions LR can deal with.  For the JPGs, you'll likely have some slight pixel variation due to recompression, and with either type of images, resaving will change the file-system dates so you won't know when they were created, anymore, easily.  I don't know if there is some utility that you can use to remember all the file-system dates and then rewrite them back when the resaving is finished.  If the files are renamed to have the creation date as part of the name then the file-system dates aren't so much of a concern.

[Lady_Blackshapes · Accepted solution]

Here's a fix:

Try to move the original file somewhere else. Chances are finder will kick your butt and say nope, some data is unreadable. Select all the items a second time, right click -> New Folder with items. Bingo that will work. Move that folder out, start your Lightroom catalog and point it at the new folder.

This will only work if you can read the file in another application. (PS, Windoze etc....) If the file is corrupted elsewhere then it is corrupted. I don't know why this works, but it just does.

Best of luck

[Marymargret101]

Hello,

it's now 2018 and I was also having this problem. I ended up putting the file into PS and saving it and the same error showed up. Only in PS it informed me that the file name was not valid. I realized all my failures to import had special characters in it ex: //??. Try deleting those characters and importing again. Worked for me.

Hope this helps someone else since this is the first link that shows up in google for help.

Best of luck.