hundreds of .dng files now won't open in Photoshop or Lightroom—yet work fine in Apple Photos!!!

[Mark McQueen]

For many years I have been slavishly converting my raw files to DNG in the (apparently mistaken) belief that this would ensure continued compatibility with Photoshop and Lightroom. Going back a few years I have discovered hundreds—possibly thousands—of dng files that won't open at all in Photoshop or Lightroom ("unexpected end-of-file occurred"). These same files OPEN WITHOUT A PROBLEM IN APPLE's PHOTOS APP.

• None of these images have ever before been opened in any program other than Photoshop and Lightroom.
• My backup versions of the same files won't open in Photoshop or Lightroom either.
• Apple's Photos app has no problem with any of these files. They also appear quickly in Apple's Preview. So don't tell me it's my hardware.
• How is this possible?
• The tedious task of finding the bad ones, opening them in Photos, exporting to TIF and then importing them again to Lightroom is simply not practical. There MUST be a better way—and a way to prevent this from happening again.
• This is an emergency for me, as I must have access to all these files for a huge project due this Friday

[dj_paige]

But hard drive sectors can go bad, while other sectors are fine. Perhaps the larger DNG files were stored in one sector while the smaller JPG files were stored in a different sector. (Yes, I'm speculating...) Just because you think the files are contiguous when you look at Windows Explorer or Mac Finder doesn't mean they are contiguous on the hard drive.

[Mark McQueen]

That’s what I’m saying!!! They are NOT contiguous (randomly interspersed

through many folders, over several years), they ARE all RAW files, on the

same drive as many gigabytes of other types of data, including non-photo

data.

On December 13, 2018 at 9:58:18 AM, dj_paige (forums_noreply@adobe.com)

[Jao vdL]

Where you see them in explorer or finder has NOTHING to do with their

location on the hard disk. The layout in folders and such is just an

abstraction that is unrelated to the physical layout of the hard drive.

Also, most files are not in contiguous places on the hard drive . They are

usually in multiple small blocks all over the drive. Hard drive failure

comes in many variants. Sometimes you will get physical damage in one

sector and it will affect all ver the drive in a seemingly random fashion.

More pernicious is when you get damage to a region where the indices to

files and where the different parts of a file are stored. This will

randomly scramble files up and you get files that seem to stop halfway

through.

If you do nothing else, I would run the system's disk checking tools on

this disk and see what it does. It's disk utility on the Mac, right click

on the drive and do properties in windows hit tools and check the disk.

These don't catch a lot of problems but are a simple first line.

On Thu, Dec 13, 2018 at 8:01 AM Mark McQueen <forums_noreply@adobe.com>

[Mark McQueen]

I know. Again, it’s the fact that only .dng files are affected, nd dng

files from several years’ time. neither Disk Utility nor Disk Warrior

report any problem

[Hal P Anderson]

Mark,

I tried to import your DNG file in LR 8.1 and got this error message: "Failed to find a place for the imported file."

See this forum thread (and the thread that it points to) for a possible solution: https://www.lightroomqueen.com/community/threads/a-solution-to-failed-to-find-a-place-for-the-import...

The problem seems (like yours) to be a corruption in part of the metadata. I don't know how it got corrupted, perhaps a bug in some earlier version of Photoshop. The good news is that the raw data seems intact. I'm able to use FastStone (with the appropriate raw settings) to display the raw file.

Hal

[Mark McQueen]

Unfortunately learning and running a command-line app to fix this problem

involves more time than I have.

Fwiw, I have narrowed down the problem further: All of the affected files

were taken with a Canon 5d Mark II. No other RAW files on those

drives—including from other Canons, Nikons and Kodak cameras between 2002

and 2018—are affected. And the affected ones are randomly distributed among

others from that camera that are fine.

On December 13, 2018 at 3:41:26 PM, Hal P Anderson (forums_noreply@adobe.com)

[bhousto90]

I do not know what caused the issue but when I opened your sample file in Exiftool it reports an error reading 'IFD0 entry 16' .

On1 Photoraw 2018 will open the file and you can edit it but it will not let not you save metadata to the DNG (cannot remember exact error message) The full resolution RAW data looks to be used vs jpeg preview.

Also cannot save metadata to file using Photomechanic (it displays the lower res jpg preview).

So, it seems that the metadata portion of the file has the corruption/error vs the raw data itself. It seems that Adobe software is more critical about this error vs some of these other software products.

I tried to see if I could delete some of the metadata using Exiftool but it just resulted in an error. There may be other forum members that are more versed in using exiftool or other DNG file recovery methods.

[justinguiel]

PROBABLE SOLUTION: to any one stumbling on this question, I know why it happened to me. My photos, which are stored in dropbox, were in cloud-only. They appeared as if they were on my computer with a preview, but Lightroom couldn't open them. I made them available on my machine, and now it works fine. So if your photos are backed up by Apple, Google, or other cloud storage providers, this is probably why.

[Jao vdL]

Ow! Thanks for coming back and giving this update. That is a really important thing to be aware of with more and more people using these cloud services that use these sort of tiny placeholder files to represent the cloud file.