Files are corrupted by Lightroom: White rectangle

Can you site the reference to the Nikon raw file corruption? I hadn't seen that one. I would love to rule out Canon RAW from the equation.

My workflow only includes Lightroom, which is why I find it hard to believe Lightroom isn't responsible for the corruption. I use Lightroom to import photos from the CF card, and also have Lightroom create a backup copy upon import. In my most recent example of a corrupted file, the file in the imported directory is corrupted while the copy in the backup directory is not corrupted.

It is highly unlikely that this is a hardware issue as there have been a significant number of people reporting the exact same type of corruption, all with very different setups and platforms.

I have seen this corruption happening for some time, but until yesterday I believed it to be isolated to the import process. In cases where I saw a corrupted file I had a backup copy to replace it and I could keep working.

However, yesterday I had a set of much older photo files (9 months old) that were previously uncorrupted that became corrupted while using Lightroom and this has lead me here and raised a very significant concern that my photos are being corrupted well after the import process.

Since so many have reported this, yet I have seen no one find a solution, it is very worrisome.

To be clear, Martin, this was one image that came up corrupted? It's almost a certainty it wasn't corrupted by Lightroom, as LR only renders from the RAW file, not rendering the file itself.

I'd also go to v 2.1 if I were you. My 5D files look a treat in there.

There would appear to be enough people posting of corruption issues here that we would have a solution by now. Yet, despite early response from Adobe, I haven't seen anyone from Adobe respond with a solution, and the number of people posting with identical corruption issues certainly points to Lightroom as the source of the corruption.

I am also experiencing corruption issues identical to those described on this thread. In particular the corruption I am seeing is just like the corruption reported by Chris D Miller in this thread on Sep 26, 08 PST (His image was here http://redyeti.net/Rome/content/IMG_6618_large.html )

I am willing to supply sample files if that would help. I have an example where a Canon Rebel XT .CR2 file that was imported from a CF card via Adobe Lightroom has corruption, yet the same file copied from the CF card to the HD does not have the corruption. The file sizes are the same, but a compare shows differences in the data. The .CR2 file has been corrupted by Lightroom in exactly the same way as others on this thread have posted about. I have many cases now where files that have otherwise gone undamaged for months, begin to appear as corrupted by Lightroom.

The corruption seems to be permanent: Opening with Photoshop CS3, Canon ZoomBrowser, and Lightroom all show a corrupted RAW image.

This is likely not a hardware issue as there have been many postings with this identical issue all with very different setups.

The only two things I can seem to find in common is that everyone is using Lightroom and I have only seen posts from folks with Canon RAW images. Is Lightroom having a problem with Canon RAW files?

If anyone has found a solution to this madness please let us know. Adobe are you still listening?

is this the hard drive as I am experiencing the same problem

I have a similar problem with corrupt images, eg:

http://redyeti.net/Rome/content/IMG_6618_large.html

It doesn't appear to be the .cr2 file itself that is corrupt though - I'll explain why shortly.

Here's my setup:

* Canon 40D (I *think* I also saw this sometimes in the past with my old 350D too, can't confirm that though sorry).
* Multiple CF cards, choice & brand of card doesn't appear to be a factor.
* Computer is an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+, DFI LanParty NF4 motherboard, 2x1GB OCZP4001G RAM (PC3200). HDD containing photos is 300GB Maxtor 6B300S0. S.M.A.R.T analysis (using SpeedFan) indicates the HDD is in very good health.
* Graphics card is nVidia 6800GT with recent drivers (v163.75). I've just upgaded to v178.13, don't yet know if that makes any difference.
* Running Windows XP with latest patches. Lightroom 2.0, but I've seen the problem with 1.4.x too.

My workflow:

* Put CF card into a USB card reader, copy files off using Windows Explorer to a folder on my HDD.
* Import the files into Lightroom, leaving files at their original location.
* metadata & changes are made to sidecar XMP files.
* Typically the thumbnail previews all show up fine, and when I click on a photo in Develop mode the larger preview is fine too. It's not until the photo has finished "Loading..." that the corruption appears. I assume this is because the embedded JPGs are used for the previews, and the corruption is occurring when processing the RAW data.

I'd estimate I get 1-2 corrupt images per 100 photos. It's annoying because I don't discover which images are corrupt until I start working on a particular image in detail. But the really interesting thing is, I *do not* have to recopy the image off the CF card to correct the problem. I have found a couple of workarounds:

* Rename the file on disk, and reimport it. This tricks Lightroom into thinking it's a new image, and almost always this 'new' image renders fine!
* Delete the sidecar XMP file and force Lightroom to resync the metadata. Again, this often fixes the problem (though not as reliably as the first approach).

I've also tried 'touching' the cr2 file (updating the creation date of the file), which I think works sometimes once Lightroom resyncs it.

In other words, it appears as though the file on disc is physically fine, but something happens when Lightroom processes the cr2 raw file that causes the corruption. Forcing Lightroom to reprocess the file from scratch generally straighten things out. The question is, what's causing the problem? I have a few theories:

* RAM. Some time back I upgraded from 2x512MB to 2x1GB sticks, different manufacturer and specification. There were definitely some stability problems when I first did this, it took a few goes with different sticks in different slots, BIOS changes etc to get my PC booting again. I've run several memory tests since (including one built into my BIOS) without seeing any problems, but perhaps there is some corruption happening when using Lightroom. Unfortunately I can't remember whether or not the problems started appearing around the time of this upgrade.
* Some sort of HDD/bus issue causing data to be corrupted as it is read from HDD. Also unlikely I would think since no other apps or data have any problems with data integrity/corruption.
* Corrupt Lightroom catalog.
* Threading issue in Lightroom. It's possible that a bug in some multithreading code is causing data corruption in memory when the files are processed. Seems a little unlikely, but certainly possible.
* Lightroom bug when handling Canon (40D only?) CR2 files.
* Conflict with another running application or video drivers. Can't think of anything that might be to blame but who knows...

I hope the above information is of some use. I'm happy to send through example images or provide any other information you might want as I'd love to see this problem solved. I also plan on upgrading my PC in about 2-3 months' time, it'll be interesting to see if new hardware makes the problem go away then.

Chuck-

If you dump the card onto the DT, or directly where you'll want the image files to reside, do you still get anomalies? IAE, this method, till you get sorted, should be faster, safer.... unless it, too, is borked.

> Import the first time and always get lots of corrupted thumbnails and no possible way I can find in Lr2 to fix this.

Always? Something is wrong in the hardware somewhere. Could be anywhere in the digital string all the way to the motherboard.

Same problem as many are reporting here, with some interesting diagnostics.

HOW THE PROBLEM PRESENTS
*Canon 40D
*Problem presents with use of three or more different CF cards (it is not the cards)
*Problem presents while importing directly into Lr2 from camera to computer via USB cable OR loading from computer CF temp drive (no camera connection)into Lr2
*Problem presents while importing from computer CF temp drive (no camera connection) into Ps Bridge AND viewing in Bridge viewing option #2. (No corruptions appear in thumbnails in viewing option #1, the default)
NOTE: In Bridge, the corruptions disappear when I double click the corrupt thumbnail and move into Camera Raw. Then I can work as normal. You would never know any corruption ever existed. However, nothing works to get around the corruption as it appears in Lr2. Even switching to edit in Ps(CS3)simply brings over the corruption.

WORKAROUND AND POSSIBLE DIAGNOSTIC
I can import all files without corruption if I do two to three imports of the same files from the same CF card into Lr2. This is the procedure, a true pain, but 100% effective so far:

*Import the first time and always get lots of corrupted thumbnails and no possible way I can find in Lr2 to fix this.
*Delete the corrupted files from disk
*Import a second time all files. Usually all corruptions fixed, i.e., the previously corrupted files appear just fine this second time around. If not, I repeat deletion of the few remaining corruptions AND
*Import a third time. Never had to go past three imports and have never lost a file when using this recovery procedure.

NOTE: The problem presents and this workaround works no matter how many different CF cards I use. But, of course, this shouldn't be necessary. Something is very wrong. It is a mystery to me why Adobe Camera RAW ignores the corruption while Lr2 does not, unless I import over and over again, as above.

Chuck Sale

Chuck Sale Photography

http://chucksalephotography.zenfolio.com

Eric, I am using a Mac Pro 2.66Ghz Quad Core with 4Gb of RAM, running OSX 10.5.4.

Mike

> The corrupted images either have no thumbnails & can't be opened, or look totally distorted or have .swp after the name.

If you look at this thread from last year
http://www.adobeforums.com/webx?128@@.3bc48213 , you will conclude that the most likely cause of your problem is hardware-related.

When I converted to Lr2, I had a similar occurrence on one of 2 PCs. There were many images without thumbnails, all .jpg (never raw files,well Lr never writes to raw files). For the .jpg files that had problems there was a corresponding .jpg.swp file. By renaming the .jpg and then removing the .swp from the .jpg.swp file all was well again. But I moved all my images to another drive and have not experienced any problems since. The drive that originally contained my images (external USB just to port images) is still in use and from time to time there are Warnings in System Error log. (Description: An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk4\D during a paging operation. By the way \Harddisk4\D is a DVD reader containing no disc!.Microsoft has this article on the error: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/244780/en-us. Interestingly in the More Information section it says
>"For example, event ID 51 is logged when blank media such as CDR, CDRW, DVDR, and so on, is inserted into a writable drive while a USB device is plugged in. The system logs the event even though the disc is writable, and the USB device is still usable. In these particular cases, you can safely ignore the log entries, and no additional action is required.".

I wonder?