Lightroom: Fails to import some valid scanned TIFFs created by Mac Image Capture

I am having this trouble with MAC ventura.  "Unsupported compression alogorithm".  

We've all been trained to avoid JPEG in favor of lessless formats. I use lossless TIFFs for the initial scans in my project of scanning tens of thousands of archival slides. 

But these days, with higher resolution images and the high-quality JPEG compression setting, it can be very hard to distinguish the difference visually between lossless TIFF and high-quality JPEG, even after multiple edits.  I save the final versions of my slide scans as high-quality JPEGs, saving tons of disk space and upload time (locally and in the cloud services where I publish them).

John, thanks again for your time and expertise.  I just now loaded exiftool and learning how to use it.  I see the results you noted - JPEG compression on everything I've been scanning using Image Capture on two different scanners using the TIFF setting.  This gives me a lot to play with.  Maybe I can alter my workflow enough to create lossless TIFFs, but I appreciate your insight into the LZW vs JPEG question.  Not sure why I'm being so picky, it's probably not worth the extra effort and JPEG will be more than adequate for these random snapshots.  Thanks much, John, you've been very helpful!

"I'm bugged by the idea of using JPEG as I'm trying to archive my whole library of prints in the most enduring format I can."

JPEG format will be with us practically forever -- it's the most commonly used industry-standard file format.

TIFF with JPEG compression is also a common industry standard, and there will always be tools to read it. But as we saw with Photoshop (now fixed) and LR (not yet fixed), perhaps not as many tools.

So for the most enduring archival format from Image Capture with Auto Selection, I recommend JPEG, which will give exactly the same image quality as TIFF with JPEG compression.

Unfortunately, the easiest way is to try importing the TIFF into LR -- if you see "unsupported compression algorithm":

then you know the file was compressed with something LR can't handle.

If you're comfortable with command-line tools, you can use the free Exiftool utility:

$ exiftool -compression Scan.tiff 
Compression                     : JPEG

Hi John, thanks for the response. I am using the 'Auto Selection: Detect Separate Items' setting.  I'm bugged by the idea of using JPEG as I'm trying to archive my whole library of prints in the most enduring format I can.  Is there a practical way to tell if a photo has been scanned using JPEG compression as opposed to LZW when you're using the TIFF setting? 

Are you using Mac Image Capture to scan images, with Auto Selection: Detect Separate Items?  If so, use the workaround described above: Scan as JPEG, not as a TIFF. There won't be any loss of quality, since internally the TIFFs created by Image Capture are using JPEG compression anyway.

Hey all, I realize this is an old thread but I'm here to report that it's still a bug.  I tried your trick of setting 0 angle, Robandmars80, but LR 10.0 still rejects it.  File sizes are not small, typically over 1 MB.  Still hoping to find a workaround that allows me to continue scanning to TIFF and import into LR without a conversion stage.

If I simply rename the file as .tif in the Finder, LR does not accept it.  When I bring it into XnConvert and save it as TIFF with no other modifications, the file extension changes to .tif and LR accepts it just fine.  

Thanks all!