Lightroom has encountered problems reading this photo

[martinr42570729]

Hi All,

I've read several posts on here, some of which are similar but don't seem to answer my problem (or it's my lack of understanding).

I have a few images that I've been working on suddenly develop a problem as per the title of this post and it's telling me that I will not be able to make adjustments to the photo.

First of all, I'm not sure why all of a sudden I'm experiencing this problem and secondly, I can make adjustments but am I to understand this as the adjustments made will not be saved?

Also, after editing an image, I synced several others to copy over my edit and whilst doing so I then started to get several other images (that were being synced) develop the same problem.

For some reason I went to look at the file in finder and in library and in doing so, most of the exclamation marks on the thumbnails disappeared?

What do I need to do to work around this, should I delete those images from Lightroom and re export the originals ? 

TIA 

[josephlavine]

Please share information on your computer system and software version.

Warmly/j

[martinr42570729]

Hi,

iMac Retina 5k, 27-inch, late 2015

16gb RAM

Graphics AMD Radeon R9 M390 2GB

MacOS Mojave version 10.14.6

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic 10.3 

[dj_paige]

Lightroom has encountered problems reading this photo

This almost always indicates a corrupted file, caused almost always by a hardware malfunction somewhere. Find a recent backup of the file, or if it still exists on the camera card, and copy it to the exact same folder where the corrupted file is, thereby  overwriting the corrupted file with the (hopefully) good copy. DO NOT DELETE THE FILES FROM LIGHTROOM. DO NOT IMPORT.

This is so important, I am going to say it three more times.

DO NOT IMPORT.

DO NOT IMPORT.

DO NOT IMPORT.

DO NOT IMPORT.

DO NOT IMPORT.

[martinr42570729]

Thanks DJ_Paige, I'll keep a hold of that thought process for future reference. 

[dj_paige]

You're not going to try the method suggested?

[martinr42570729]

---

@dj_paige wrote:

You're not going to try the method suggested?

---

It's not that I'm not going to try, it's more that I can't. They weren't really that important (a few family shots) and I had formatted the card without backing up the original images, which I don't usually do for personal fun shots.

But so that I'm understanding for the future, should this happen again, I just copy the file from the second backup or card and drop it in the same folder (typically on my hard drive) where Lightroom is receiving the images from (overwriting the original)?

[dj_paige]

But so that I'm understanding for the future, should this happen again, I just copy the file from the second backup or card and drop it in the same folder (typically on my hard drive) where Lightroom is receiving the images from (overwriting the original)?

YES (and assuming the backup or original on the camera card is un-corrupted, it will work; if the corruption occured on the camera card when the photo was created by the camera, then I think you are out of luck)

... and I stress, you do a copy, not a move (or copy and paste, not cut and paste)

[GoldingD]

 I went to look at the file in finder and in library and in doing so, most of the exclamation marks on the thumbnails disappeared?

What hard drive are you keeping the photos on?

Is that an external drive?

Is that drive allowed to sleep?

[martinr42570729]

It is an external drive and it does go into sleep mode. I've not really had a problem with doing this in the passed but I've not had the chance to close off this workload in a while (whereas the other stuff has, mainly)....

is that what you think the potential problem is? 

[GoldingD]

Yes

On a LrC rig, do not allow those drives to go asleep. Just asking for problems.

[martinr42570729]

Thanks for this. 🙂