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Hey guys,
I did a shoot in Yellowstone a few months ago. Everything fine on the back of the camera. Even did some early edits. Later, went back to make some more edits and around 10 of the files (out of 1k) suddenly had lines like this appear on them in Lightroom. They are actually on the RAW file because no matter where I open them, they are there.
Any thoughts as to what's going on? Or if it can be fixed? I have a major shoot coming up I'm traveling for and it would be good to know if it's a camera issue, SD card, or Lightroom issue, or something else. I can't risk some of my photos being messed up like this.
Camera: A7riii
SD: Sansdisk 256GB Extreme Pro
Current Lightroom on 2020 16" MacBook Pro
Any help would be amazing!
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This is most likely a hardware problem, and the challenge with that is identifying where that problem lies. It could be a problem with the card, a failing hard drive, a faulty card reader, etc. It's up to you to find the source of the problem.
In the future, when including images with your messages, please use the feature provided on the website that will include the image as part of your message.
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Thanks for pointing that out. New to the forum and how to use it.
It's strange because I travelled to 7 National Parks over 5 weeks, and this only happened on my pics in Yellowstone. It was as if this three-day window had this issue, but that was it. And the issue began after importing them and editing them once in Lightroom. I used the same camera, same SD cards, and the same external hard drive on the same computer. So weird. Thanks for your help.
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Where did your trip to Yellowstone hit in the sequence of trips? Was it the first, in the middle, or the last? Have you taken any images with those cards since the trips? How old are the cards? Do you reformat the cards in the camera? How old is the external hard drive you are importing the images to?
When images are imported to Lightroom it is a simple copy process. The Lightroom editing process does not modify those images in any way. Lightroom is a nondestructive editing system. All changes made to the images are stored in the catalog, nothing is ever done to change the state of the master images. Others have attempted to put the blame for corrupted images on the Lightroom editing process. But frankly, there isn't any way that can happen.
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It was the second stop on our trip, but I used the same cards for 7 National Parks and Yellowstone was 2/7, and the only photos that had this issue. I have used these cards for many shoots since, but just replaced them to be safe. They were not very old, and yes, I reformat before every shoot. The external drive I use is newer, a high-end SSD.
It's certaintly the RAW files themselves, but the strange thing is I edited these files initially with no problem, but when I went back to them later, many of them corrupted as shown in the photo. While I know Lightroom is non-destructive, it's still strange that this happended after I imported them and edited them, and only corrupted when I returned later.
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As file corruption goes, this is one of the weirder varieties I've seen. But it comes in all forms, depending on where it happens.
An often overlooked source of corruption is flaky cables and loose connectors. When using card readers, external drives, anything temporarily connected by cable, it's important to not touch it while the transfer is in progress. A sudden bump and the connection can fail for a microsecond. I've seen corruption caused by this and learned my lesson.
And no, Lightroom can't cause this. The embedded jpeg preview is a much smaller chunk of data, so it is much less likely to be corrupted even if the raw file itself is corrupt. So other applications that just display the jpeg will appear fine.
If you catch this immediately, it's important to copy the files to disk again, after checking all components as far as possible. Corruption can't be fixed, and if the card is formatted it's too late.
Just to cover all possibilities - did you use electronic (silent) shutter? That's the only way I can see the camera itself causing something like this (the sensor is scanned line by line).
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No, I wasn't using silent shutter. It really is a strange thing that has happened. I do use an adapter to read the SD cards, as the Macbook Pro only has USB-C ports. Perhaps this was the issue.... not sure. I answered some questions above, but still haven't resolved the issue, nor can I repeat it. Strange times.