Apple Photos app corrupts images(tenderlovemaking.com) |
Apple Photos app corrupts images(tenderlovemaking.com) |
https://github.com/LANDrop/LANDrop
I used it along with another called Localsend, but the later one gave me a bit of headache and crashed while transferring some large files last time I used it, but still great as an alternative too, and it’s open source as well.
Edit: Actually, you are correct, it seems they did close it! Try localsend instead.
For the 99.999% of us who just use our phone, nothing to worry about.
Scared me for no reason! =P
(sorry not sorry)
Personally, I have seen a row of green pixels on the top or bottom + vertically flipped photos on import.
Good sleuthing!
https://cdfinder.de/blog/files/image_capture_bug.html
(I'm not sure whether this bug has been fixed or not yet, though I think it has been fixed.)
I wouldn't say that out loud. Apple's motto with software is move slow, break backwards compat anyway.
I've stopped buying apple stuff
I got similar symptoms as mentioned, I suspected AFS+, but what do I know. It has happened on at least 3 iphones (pros), now when I think about it, I don’t remember any iphone I haven’t have troubles with. Having 5000+ images (non-raw) where 5-10% are corrupt is infuriating, but I just stupidly buy another iphone every year (the most expensive one).
Re-importing images 10-100 times could sometimes extract a few additional images, but the phone just disconnects after a while when running such scripts.
https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-mobileme-failure-...
https://gist.github.com/tenderlove/25853f50ab46a58738ff2cc22d682f2b
As far as I can tell:
- 0x7800 bytes were replaced at file offset 0x00aa0000
- 0x2200 bytes were replaced at file offset 0x00aa8000
I can't tell if the replacement data came from a different part of the file, or somewhere totally different. Race condition somewhere sounds plausible.
The visible effect shown could be due to a change as small as a single bit flip. It also could be that large parts of the file got overwritten, or that it partially got zeroed. The exact kind of damage can help pinpoint the cause of the problem.
That said, the article does mention replacing basically all the hardware and still encountering the issue. FWIW, my personal experience with Apple software so far is that the usage expected for Average Joe is well tested and polished. But stepping outside of that, it's "Here be dragons" territory very quickly.
Yes this argument is a bit unconvincing for me. Not saying Apple photos doesn't corrupt his files, but this is not real proper investigating either.
That's a mistake no mater what application you're importing to, else we'll be graced with another blog post, "Darktable app Corrupts Photos".
What's the purpose of RAW+jpg though? Seems rather redundant?
Thanks dad.
You get to keep out of camera jpg files. Some people might like how their camera processes jpg files and might also want the raw file for a scenario when a more complex editing is needed.
It sounds like Photos App can have issues trying to import both at the same time?
Processing RAW can be expensive time wise. If you’re sorting through a session of 10,000 photos, you want the speed that comes with the jpeg variant, which allows you to quickly sort out blurry, smeared, severely mis-exposed, and other various defect photos.
The storage cost is negligible (JPEG75@10MP is cheap) and the workflow benefit is immediate. Additionally, cropping and early white balance corrections (as well as a handful of other things) are much faster to preview with a non-RAW version of the image; since you’ll be processing that detail later anyway from scratch in the RAW later, it’s functionally free to do it on the jpeg version before you dig into the raw.
Additionally, there’s a cheap debugging aspect that you saw here: was it Apple Photos mishandling ORF? Was it something else? When working with both, you have a “reference” that can be used to make sure your digital development pipeline is set up correctly; finer details about the imager can sometimes get mangled by some RAW developers like pixel order and sub pixel blending. Not every CCD is a linear grid, not every LCD looks the same, but if you can get your RAW pipeline producing ≈the same as your camera did, it verifies that you have things mostly set up correctly.
GP isn't wrong though. Most cameras embed a medium quality full-resolution JPEG along a couple different thumbnails in raw files, so saving raw+normal JPG is kinda pointless, because the raw already contains that jpeg. Raw+jpg is only easier in the sense that many/most non-vendor tools - even viewers - can't properly handle the embedded jpg so it's easier to just duplicate the storage (e.g. 50 MB for the raw + 10-20 MB for the JPG) and take the hit on storage consumption/transfer time.
If I'm going to share the photo to an album or something, I process the RAWs selectively.
But yes, keeping the cards for a while and rotating a large pool can be a good approach. When they're in actual reliable ro-at-rest, checksummed, possibly encrypted, offline backup, the cards can be reused. (Always format in device etc.)
What's the purpose of RAW+jpg though? Seems rather redundant?
I personally would not let device A to automatically delete files from device B while files are being copied from B to A.
My workflow is quite manual when bringing pictures in from camera to my MacBook.
- I simply take the SD Card from the camera and then use the SD Card reader on MacBook itself to copy the files (RAW + JPEG) into a working directory.
- Move just the JPEGs into Apple Photos library
- The ones which I think I can/should improve using RAW processing, are processed in DxO Photo Lab and exported to JPEG with a *_DXO.JPEG filename
- DXO Processed JPEGs are added to Apple Photos again. This time due to the naming scheme, the DXO processed JPEGs and camera baked JPEGs are next to each other which helps in quickly checking the results.
- Delete the camera baked JPEG once I am happy with DXO's output
Regarding...
What's the purpose of RAW+jpg though? Seems rather redundant?
I only keep JPEGs in Apple Photos as all of my image library is backed up to iCloud and don't want that duplication.
RAW files get backed up to another SSD. Looking into a better backup for RAW files.
Also, since I switched recently to a camera which uses CFeB cards for best experience (but also has a SD card slot), the onboard SD Card reader on my MacBook will become useless for this once I get an external CFeB reader.
So some part of the chain with 512 byte buffer size corrupted the data.
It doesn't look like a memory corruption but if this were my computer I'd run the equivalent of memtest86 on it.
It looks like a filing system corruption to me. Running `diskutil info` on the main harddisk and the sd card might be interesting to see if the block sizes match.
Running a disk tester on the sd card and the main disk might be a good idea too. Here is one I wrote: https://github.com/ncw/stressdisk
It varies by vendor and sometimes even firmware revision.
Recently, importing via image capture has resulted in recurrent crashes. Files appear on Image Capture that do not appear on the iPhone, nor can they be downloaded via image capture, or deleted. I wish I knew wtfudge was going on.
So much wasted time, now I just use image capture to import and organize directly.
Still get errors from time to time.
Apple needs to hire more quality control, their software integration is going from a positive to a negative.
Seamless integration was a large part of Apple's initial hook, and continues to be a part of their drive to push services, it should be a priority.
On day 7 or so the import failed and all files on the pad got corrupted. But also the SD card got corrupted.
I stopped using the device and the card because I knew not all is lost. I had to buy a new card in SF as replacement. Back home I used a recovery software to check if data is still on the card (I used the same software before on a card that got deleted by another person and I was able to get all images back). I was able to get most of the images recovered and also recovered a few from the iPad. All in all I lost maybe 10 out of a few 100. Now I travel with multiple cards and backup already each night while in the hotel. And I don’t delete the images on the SD Card. I format only when I’m sure I have everything copied and secured.
I think he was just looking for an excuse to buy new kit
I've been importing raws for years from Sony and earlier from Pentax and didn't experience it.
In fact searching for "OM image corruption" shows bunch of results not related to Apple Photo.
My guess is that OM has buggy SD driver which starts deletion before actual read finished.
There's also the excellent osxphotos utility which can export / backup / migrate photos in and out of apple photos:
No longer have to bring laptop or external drive along for backups
I learned the hard way to never delete photos from the SD. Just buy a new one it's so cheap anyway.
Great article by the way, sounds like my kind of rabbit hole :)
Not a good idea, you are going to have piles and piles of SD cards that will be hard to manage, and you will burn through $$$.
Every professional/paid client I shoot for, I do on new SD cards. I have dual slot cameras, so one card just permanently lives in my camera and gets formatted between shoots, the other I treat as a one-time use card.
Doesn't eat into my margin too much, and I appreciate the extra redundancy when dealing with someone else's wedding photos, so that if somehow something went catastrophically wrong with the rest of my back up process and off sites, at the very least I still have the SD card with the RAWs on it.
Last time I looked (pre-COVID) there wasn't a lot of promising options, and some didn't support HEIF images
It's strictly for looking and exploring old photos. It doesn't do photo editing (except metadata editing), nor do I expect it to.
My $dayjob is IT/infrastructure ops, so backup hygiene is engraved in me as a core value. A shocking amount of people outside of tech have no concept of backups or redundancy.
Photos does a lot of extra work on import (merging RAW+JPEG pairs, generating previews, database indexing, optional deletion), so my guess is a concurrency bug where a buffer gets reused or a file handle is closed before the copy finishes.
Rare, nondeterministic corruption fits the profile.
They constantly ask for an example project, even if it's something that is easily demonstrated, simply by running existing Apple software, and creating a project, would be a huge pain.
They also ignore reports. Very rarely, I may get a ping on one of my reports, asking me to verify that it was fixed in some release. Otherwise, there's no sign that they ever even read it.
I usually end up closing my bug reports and feature requests, after a few months, because I'm tired of looking at them.
It's clear that they consider every bug report to be a burden. That's a very strange stance, but then, they are not a typical company.
I guess you can't argue with the results, as they have a market value North of 3 trillion dollars, but that does not make it any less annoying.
Which means that if that bug has been present since the (now unsupported) Mavericks, tough luck!
I would think the diffs would be telling to the right people.
It's on the front page of HN, so that's a good start!
What's the point of it? It is well known in the industry they ignore bugreports.
Also, this bug doesn't affect the majority of users, so it won't ever be fixed.
Random is random, and random is clumpy, so maybe swapping parts is irrelevant, but... I wanted more detail how often the corruption happened throughout his replacement journey.
edit: also wth i just realized I went to "tenderlovemaking.com" at work. gross. lol.
> I stopped checking the “delete after import” button
Edit: Nevermind, the contents are vastly changed. This is like a different stream of input got used, or a buffer was written over with contents from another image.
”Glad” to see it was an actual bug.
It’s more likely that things will be reversed: the old, battle-tested framework may have bugs, but it’s is less likely to have serious ones.
They should try to hunt down bugs in the existing code. A partial rewrite of parts that historically have many bugs may be in order, but a complete replacement? Unlikely to be an improvement.
A better way to have further narrowed down the problem down to Actually iPhoto would've been to do the same tests with a USB-C card reader plugged directly into the Mac, which would've eliminated cables, hubs, and camera hardware/software/firmware as possibilities.
It's worth noting that searches show that OM-1 USB support is imperfect, the camera manual addresses that "USB transfers aren’t guaranteed in some setups", and user consensus seems to be to use a card reader for reliable file transfers.
That is a... pretty damning thing to have in your user manual. I've owned many cameras over the years, and I don't think I've ever seen a manufacturer hedge basic functionality like this.
> Data transfer is not guaranteed in the following environments, even if your computer is equipped with a USB port.
>> Computers with a USB port added by means of an extension card, etc., computers without a factory-installed OS, or home-built computers
Manual for version 1.7 page 286
https://download.omsystem.com/pages/inst/om1/manual_om1_v1.7...
Never use the camera over USB, the experience is terrible on everything from Canon to Sony to Panasonic to Fuji.
Don't fight it, just buy that $30 USB hub and get on with your day.
But good gravy that troubleshooting path got expensive real fast. Replacing the laptop and the camera? Why not start by trying something other than Photos? It doesn’t even need to be a paid product; the Olympus software is free not to mention a good baseline since it - of all the applications - should be able to import photos without corrupting them.
Edit to add: delete on import seems pretty risky. My workflow is to import and only delete from the camera after 1) the imported photos are backed up 2) I’ve done a first pass culling.
I have since turned off iCloud Photo Library, downgraded iCloud (no longer needed so much storage), and started using fully open source photo management with flat files on disk.
I’ve used Olympus cameras for over a decade. Well, the same camera to be honest, a PEN E-PM2. This has only appeared in the past couple of years.
I haven’t seen it on photos from my Canon EOS 80D yet, but I guess it’s time to change my workflow. And maybe OS.
Though, considering the macOS 26, it’s likely the Photos app.
Tangential story - 12-13 years ago I was a burgeoning and super eager software dev that moved to Seattle to be closer to "the scene." tenderlove's content was a major reason for me going there and I poured through his posts learning way too much about Nokogiri, Active Record, and much much more.
I went to every Ruby meetup I could get to out there and I remember one in particular, a Seattle RB meetup, in the Substantial office. It was a pretty small group, at most 15-20 people.
I was with a coder buddy but knew nobody else. We were all just drinking pints of Manny's beer and eating pizza from Big Mario's or something. Ryan Davis (the creator of minitest among other things) was doing a presentation on Unicode.
Aaron Patterson (tenderlove) was cracking jokes at every opportunity. At one point I asked a relatively naive question and Aaron _tenderly_ answered in joke-form response. I felt such a _part_ of the scene then. Aja Hammerly was super engaged in the presentation, I think even Ryan Bates and/or Geoffrey Grosenbach were there.
It was quite surreal to be in this dream-like state around giants and heroes just doing what they were doing and being so inclusive. It seemed so normal but became a core memory.
Thanks for everything Aaron, you've truly been an inspiration!
Also a good idea to copy to multiple locations when importing. When I do professional work and import into Lightroom from SD card I have it set to create two copies - import to my external SSD (the "working" copy) and also copies the files to my NAS (which is then backed up to the cloud).
Nowhere in that process do I ever delete anything.
They finally recognized there is an issue, but there is no fix, as of a few weeks ago :(
I never need to import anything when I can simply copy the data from the card.
For the longest time my process while traveling was importing onto my iPad or occasionally my iPhone since I didn't have a personal laptop, just a Mac Mini at home.
All my photos are managed using Digikam and developed using Darktable. They are also visualized via immich, but immich only has access via a read-only mountpoint.
Everything is hosted locally of course.
Ensuring ZFS has at least 2 copies on physically separate disks and using scrub frequently is the way, right?
Please correct me if I am wrong HN!
Sure security is important but integrity is too.
Anything important should be kept inside the file. Filesystem metadata gets lost all the time, isn't consistent between operating systems, zipping up a folder and extracting it will probably mess up timestampts too.
Dropbox doesn't seem to keep timestamps properly either.
I like using filesystem timestamps to sort through things in Finder, and thankfully I like A Better Finder Attributes for being able to batch copy EXIF data into timestamps.
[1] https://www.publicspace.net/ABetterFinderAttributes/index.ht...
Something related: exporting originals from Photos used to give the current timestamp back in Ventura, which annoyed me to no end.
They fixed that bug in either Sonoma or Sequoia (I jumped straight from Ventura to Sequoia).
Sorry, I'm not sure if I'm missing something, but what's rsync's role in this?
That's because my worry is corruption of the entire Library, which Photos stores as one gigantic opaque file/directory abomination. My .photoslibrary file is currently 70gb in size, and I'm terrified of what would happen if it becomes corrupted. The Photos app crashes not infrequently.
It's a folder that acts like a file.
Right click > Show Package Contents works, and there's an "originals" folder that should have all your photos in normal everyday files.
The point is that - from a data safety standpoint - it would be better if all of the internal metadata were persisted per album, if not per photo. That way one corrupted file would only affect a small subset, rather than causing me to lose the whole library.
It writes the metadata into the audio file. Badly.
In particular, it's that "Play Count": iTunes rewrites the audio file every time you play the song.
Usually it just corrupts the metadata enough to forget the album art. But it's perfectly willing to destroy the audio data.
Then for the current files you’ll want to see what happened. Often with this class of problem either the bytes are zeroed or shifted. Since the size is the same, perhaps they’re zeroed or perhaps bytes are LE to BE or dumb shit like that (don’t know why it would be but weird world right).
Just diff and see if you see anything (I wrote off memory but you get the idea)
diff -aui <(xxd -r file1) <(xxd -r file2)
From that bare start you can see what’s up.
That describes 2025 too
When flash fails it returns garbage or zeros instead of (what was) your data. It can be tranient or persistent. And without any error codes from the storage device or the file system.
If storage returns garbage for filesystem metadata, all bets are off how the OS filesystem driver will behave.
Reformat should be done in camera. And that card used only in that camera. And only that camera gets to write to that card. And don't delete individual images.
I may be paranoid because I used to handle footage for VFX pipelines and you just do not mess around with those kinds of files. If you lose footage, you are in big trouble.
I had one case where I screwed up a shoot and thought file corruption might have been involved (it wasn't) Even though I had formatted the card with the camera and shot maybe 5 test shots I was able to recover most of the images with Disk Drill
https://www.cleverfiles.com/data-recovery-software.html
which has both Windows and Mac versions and looking at a sample of them confirmed it wasn't corruption, it was user error.
https://www.reddit.com/r/audioengineering/comments/mftc0g/ge...
It doesn't strike me as different from "porn" i.e. "unix porn" "food porn" etc, which are at least somewhat widely accepted. I assumed it was self-aware/deprecating humor, as in the people there recognized they were frequently replacing which gear they used beyond what might be strictly necessary.
It was colorful, in the way a lot of music and art is colorful. It's not like it's a sysadmin forum...
It's like, we collectively prioritize efficiency over fun and then we wonder why life is not fun even though it is efficient.
C++ reference is one of these.
It’s understandable why they changed their name.
I don’t even want to know what ZScaler thinks of “tender love making”.
Ruby's community has been all sorts of whimsy and quirky over the years.
I very much enjoy Tenderlove being the community figurehead he is as is: kind, empathetic, genuine, open-minded, and generally wholesome.
> it's just awkward with interns to explain.
I've never had any trouble talking about Aaron Patterson a.k.a Tenderlove to coworkers, interns or otherwise.
Also when you die that stuff'll go offline pretty quick I expect...
I wonder if there are any viable alternatives though.
For the future, Graphene OS devs have stated publicly that they're working with an unnamed hardware vendor to develop a phone that will meet their list of hardware requirements. Currently only the Pixel line does. From what I understand, a few Samsung phones come close, but don't support bootloader re-locking... When you unlock Samsung bootloaders it burns out a fuse on the board which in turn completely disables Knox, their architecture for a trusted execution environment.
I suspect banks won't ever be able to take their web portals down and go app-only, though Google is now trying to ram through technologies in the Chrome browser to "verify the computing platform" that will have a similar effect to the Google Play "integrity" checks for apps.
Enduring solutions to these vendor lock-in efforts must ultimately be legislative.
That being said, I mostly receive email, and the privacy benefits of running my own server would still be significant even without the ability to send email at all.
You can host it yourself, and it has quite a range of features.
I am a happy self-hosting user.
I was surprised nextcloud has a whole bunch of ai plugins
https://apps.nextcloud.com/categories/ai
funny, I run nextcloud but don't add all these plugins because they require* you to install from the cloud.
* there's a way to install apps locally, but you had to install the app store and it quickly became very complicated.
Use third party apps/services which usually function on interoperable standards/specs.
It's been years since I have used any service by either of these companies where my personal data stays inside their ecosystem - email, notes, pics, videos et cetera.. nothing.
* iTunes/Music app randomly reassign my Album artwork, with different (incorrect) art showing up on different devices!
* Reminders app: shared reminder lists can end up with the name of a different list
* Ghost photos that are deleted from my phone, and come back later.
* Maps, when I say "navigate to $friend" set a route that ended in my own driveway.
To me, these bugs suggest a fundamental design flaw, perhaps they are using a simple Integer as an index rather than a UUID?
Or maybe the database schema are solid, but there's some sort of race condition in their synchronization frameworks and the data is getting scrambled in RAM?
Whatever it is, it's absolutely insane that in 2025 these kinds of bugs are happening.
I still use Macs because data on a physical disk seems perfectly reliable, but I've been bitten by so many of these bugs in their apps. iCloud files completely disappear, then reappear a day later. Highlight a couple chapters of a PDF in Preview, then reopen the file and they're gone because iCloud thinks the older unhighlighted version is newer or something. Madness. I don't touch any of these Apple services/apps anymore.
There's very clearly a fundamental bug in whatever sync framework they seem to share across everything. It's bad enough to have data disappear entirely or deleted data reappear, but then when data shows up in the completely wrong place, and this has been happening for years and years and still isn't fixed... I don't know what to think.
You're right. There's no other word for it but "insane". They can engineer their A-series and M-series microchips, but it's been over a decade now and their sync is still fundamentally broken.
I then subscribed to Apple Music and relied on its matching function. After switching from an Intel Mac to an M2 and redownloading my library from remote, it now believes that each and every song in my library are rented Apple Music copies. Even those it shows as having been added in 2003.
Some songs are missing; some go missing, then inexplicably come back months later. Worse: so far I have found around a dozen which have been replaced by different versions.
It's a real mess.
* prompts in settings for adding an account recovery contact that never go away, even after months and months of successfully setting it up multiple times.
* OS account profile picture can barely stay associated with the most recently picked option. Happens for non-iCloud local accounts on Mac, happens when I change profile pictures on iOS for iCloud… weird.
* OS account update screens on iPad, iOS, and watchOS will forget that they are in the middle of updating if you navigate away from the settings screen. Thankfully, today they at least recover from it (it’s probably still happening in the background), but it takes several long seconds of spinning for the settings page to remember that it was doing an update two seconds ago before I navigated away from it.
* similar to your ghost pictures bug, deleting a large media file from a media player app moves it to recently deleted, but you can sometimes end up in situations where you can’t permanently delete the file, or it doesn’t show up anywhere but still takes up space. (Talking about 20GB-80GB file sizes where it makes a big difference on OS storage space)
Some of these bugs have been around for a VERY long time.
But the weird thing is I don’t see them in 3rd party apps.
Not sure when exactly that changed, but it was probably a few OS releases ago?
The Safari reading list can't even sync properly between devices for me. Image Capture ("Keep Originals"??) or AirDrop is a little minimal for such a keystone part of the phone -> computer if you don't want to use Apple ecosystem after.. Let alone the other more complicated issues.
How do you know? Why do you believe that they're competent on writing security code but not competent enough to write a general purpose app? Is there a different company culture applied to the latter?
Is that a necessary qualifier? I used to get that impression, but on the outside it's gradually become a rarely believable pitch. Without having an iPhone and without having an Apple Watch, and without having already had them years ago, it just seems like I've sort of made the right choice with just mac over the years, and with the latest OS that's becoming just a tiny bit more questionable; their decision making with software seems sus.
Like I've never had to qualify my setup of using a mac for work, Android phone for phone, and I guess Audio Technica for headphones. It's not super nerdy, it's not super integrated, but if I wanted it to be super integrated, "what value would I get out of steeping myself into the Apple ecosystem further" is the question that comes to mind. I also have an old iPad that I tried to make useful, and the iPod nano 3rd gen which was actually amazing, but ultimately was hampered by software limitations that they don't seem to have advanced on much in 10 years. I've always found their discrete hardware products to be amazing in terms of industrial design, but they've never really been compelling in terms of their utility.
The software engineering standard at Apple has clearly tanked in the last decade, which is sad because the exact opposite appears to have happened to their hardware.
Used to be, these were full software engineers embedded with dev teams, with a mission to destroy, document, and harden the apps and frameworks.
During the 2010s in all the FAANG that I’m aware of (have worked at 3), QA as a high paid American profession was completely offshored to India and responsibility for quality removed from developers concern. It’s a blocking item on the Launch Checklist. Automated testing was expected to fill the gap but has mostly been ignored.
So they do a terrible job from a data security point of view;)
Recently when I load new music onto my phone I find that random unrelated album art has been mangled or switched with other albums from other artists. And some music, which exists on my phone's hard drive, is now greyed out and when clicked says "This item is not currently available in your country or region." I am considering switching back to a iPod with an upgraded drive and giving up on keeping music on my phone completely.
maybe the randomness is based on the other apps he's using at the same time.
1 backup updated daily
every week you update the weekly backup
every month you update the monthly backup
every year you update the yearly backup
and so on or with whatever precise timings make sense for you
Keep at least the last two snapshots for each.
Also, do use error correction codes so you can recover partially damaged backups.
As an engineer on a framework, I take pride in the code and want those trickier-to-repro bugs. And to your point, yeah, I can probably reconstruct in my mind a scenario, knowing my code, where it may be vulnerable.
Whoever screens bugs though is likely trying to 1) handle the huge backlog and 2) trying to spare the engineers bugs delivered with a shrug.
(I had my ass kicked by one bug in particular where I created a FileDescriptor on the main thread, did some things and then released the FileDescriptor on a background thread. Who knew the FileDescriptor code hung some important data it needed on some kind of thread-based storage that essentially required the caller to destroy the FileDescriptor on the same thread it was created on. Fix was to dispatch back to main when ready to release the FileDescriptor.)
Nowaday all my interaction with online bank is through their app.
From my understanding the biggest reason is actually security features that only the Pixels can meet. I'm sure the reference device thing is a factor though so I don't think you're wrong
Yes, but not before syncing it with (NSA)iCloud. /s
My perspective is that I want one or two devices in my life, ideally one phone and then either a tablet or small laptop, which are maximally secure and almost never leave my direct custody. I am willing to give up root on these devices to achieve that level of security. Though I'll note that sideloading apps is absolutely possible on Graphene OS.
There are plenty of other general purpose computers at home on which I have root access and can use to tinker and experiment to my heart's content, and which I do not use for highly sensitive personal information (banking, primary email, etc).
The other important difference for me is that, whereas Graphene OS restricts root access for end-user security, companies making locked down devices withhold root from the end-user in order to keep control for themselves.
There are certainly other words for it. Lazy, anticompetitive, disinterested, any of those are more plausible than all of Apple being insane. They sold you a microchip that you knew you wanted, now they are beholden to little else. For over a decade, Apple didn't even offer the iOS APIs for third-parties to implement cloud storage. They know you need their software services, regardless of how shit they are.
Insanity would be a pretty satisfying explanation. Fickleness fits a lot better with Apple's track record though.
Apple's hardware is absolutely trash for anything that needs reliability. For shiny disposable entertainment use, it can be great.
- Cofounder of Hoppy
Re: the privacy benefits, is it just that Google (or whoever) has no access to your mail, or is there another benefit? I'm not doubting, just trying to understand specifically what you protect against? And how much is the benefit diminished, if at all, if most of your correspondents are on a BigMailServer?
Besides privacy, running your own server means you can create as many mailboxes/aliases as you like. I give each website/company a distinct alias; this allows me to revoke an alias that becomes problematic, e.g. due to spam. There are no storage limits other than those dictated by your hardware, no maximum attachment size, etc. I am immune to "terms and conditions" changing overnight that suddenly shrink my storage or put features such as IMAP access behind a paywall.
But the main benefit of moving your email off Google is they can’t nuke your email account when the AI decides you are a bot or whatever.
The complicated thing is, they were kind of right, and kind of wrong. QA in some orgs were staffed by engineers who weren't "quite as good" as the development teams, and it showed. Horrible QA tools that broke frequently, QA test passes that were fragile and took forever, and just low quality bug reports. Work that should have been automated just wasn't due to a lack of talent. Part of this is because any really good engineers who started off as an SDET (Software Development Engineer in Test) ended up moving to the SDE career track after a few promos, because the career trajectory for an SDE was much better (despite the company trying to resolve this repeatedly over the years).
So basically the SDET teams had an ongoing brain drain problem.
That said, the good SDET teams were just as good, if not better, than the development teams. The really high quality test software was incredibly good. And when debugging means going through assembly code in a debugger and figuring out what is wrong, the top engineers come off looking like magicians.
But there was too much rot in the QA orgs for them to ever be agile enough for daily releases. Microsoft went with the cost cutting approach of just laying most of them off and allowing software quality to drop, as did the vast majority of other companies.
Once Microsoft got rid of their SDET career track, it became career suicide to even bother going into QA and the entire field basically died. Microsoft SDETs were on the same pay scale (and same hiring requirements) as SDEs. When i was in college my goal was to be an SDET at Microsoft, I loved the idea of being the last line of defense against bad software, of being the one responsible for protecting users around the world. (Yes I played a lot of Paladins in D&D, how'd you guess?)
I eventually achieved my goal, became an SDET on a compiler team, got to take over maintaining one of the most impressive test systems I've ever seen [1], and spent a lot of time wiping up my own drool as ARM assembly code scrolled while I tried to trace compiler bugs.
SDETs died, I moved to be an SDE. I loved being an SDET, I loved having a job that could be summarized as "be angry for the sake of the customer". I loved that I worked in a company where the most junior of SDETs could stop an entire build from going out by saying they didn't think the build met the quality bar for a release from Microsoft (something I actually did once, emotionally it is a hard thing to do!).
Unfortunately that love and passion for quality is gone from the industry.
[1]https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/how-microsoft-tested...
I also want to point out that I've seen similar corruption in the past, only in Lightroom. The culprit ended up being hardware, not software. Specifically, the card reader's USB cable. I've actually had two of these cables fail on different readers. On the most recent one, I replaced it with a nicer Micro B to USB C cable, and haven't had an issue.
Generally I'm frustrated with the state of USB. Bad cables are all over the place and I'm inclined to throw cables out if I have the slightest problem with them. My take is that the import process with Lightroom is fast and reliable if I am using good readers and good cables; it is fine importing photos from my Sony a7iv off a CFExpress card but my Sony a7ii has always been problematic and benefits greatly from taking the memory card out and putting it in a dedicated reader, sometimes I use the second slot in the a7iv.
If nothing else, it lets you get your card back much more quickly, as a file-system copy runs at ~1500MBps, which makes a difference when importing 50-100GB of photos.
I also don't delete the images off the memory card until they've been backed up from the disk to some additional medium.
Let's just leave aside the fact that the name genuinely made many people uncomfortable and unwelcome there (it did), it was also just teenage and immature. There's ways to inject personality and fun into a social experience without giggling about sex. Talk about lowest common denominator...
There are many personalities. Not everything has to be mature
The problem is that societal consesus is often wrong, and that image of a perfectly mature person actually does have a lot of problems with it. Every generation discovers this, and redefines that ideal.
40 years ago in my country a "mature man" was expected to take part in alcohol drinking contests until blackout. Nowadays a "mature man" is expected to drink as little alcohol as possible.
Neither attitude is actually about learning and forming a personal, informed opinion, both of them are about following whatever is currently in fashion.
Is a "mature personality" mature ? How do you test for it ? /s
Yes, they do.
My older camera only had a usb 2 connection over a special connector, so I used to pop out the card. But the OM1 can also charge the battery via the usb-c connection, so it's an all-round great experience: I don't have to fiddle with random parts, not forget to put them back in, etc.
Never had a single image corrupted among dozens of thousands of them. Funnily enough, my older camera used to complain about the SD card every other time after plugging it into my mac. It would shut up after a format. That card is still going strong.
I transfer the files with lightroom (but don't remove them from the card) on a windows pc.
I'm no longer even a semi-pro photog, but these days I even just plug in a USB-C SD reader into my iPhone and upload them that way, it's quite nice really. No corruption yet for me, but I only shot a thousand photos on my trip to Italy, and few other than that these days!
I’m an old Unix guy. Files are files. Card to computer. Process later.
The /s is missing. If you were serious, please check what backup means. I would hate to see you here, in a couple of years, with "Ask HN: Apple closed account without warning. How do i recover my iCloud photos ?"
Then apple fucked everyones libraries up completely in an auto update, destroying the metadata and making them unusable, except for songs bought via apple music that is...
Btw, it was fine from withing iTunes, just never stop using iTunes I guess...
I just use KDE's default one, Klipper, and I raise the max entry number.
If something bad replaces your copy, you can get the good one back from the history.
There are nice features like QR code generation for your copied text if you want to quickly share something with someone else's phone as well.
I'll tell you a secret though that kind of pisses me off. If you have shipped with a bug, that automatically lowers the perceived priority as well. You know, as opposed to introducing a new bug in a new release. "We've already lived with that old bug…" seems to be the mind set. Oh well.
To be sure though, if you saw the number of bugs that queue up for a popular app like Photos, you'd know that fixing all of them is not going to be possible — some kind of system of prioritization is required.
Why? If your app is used by billions of people, surely you can afford a few additional testers and engineers? Your app doesn't have an unlimited number of bugs: if you are solving them faster than you are introducing them, the number of bugs will eventually approach zero.
Sure, you'll always have newly-introduced bugs which are still waiting to get fixed, but if you've got an ever-increasing pile of bugs which have been around for years - even when they have been reported with easy-to-reproduce steps - then something has gone horribly wrong with your development process. At a certain point you have to stop shoveling new crap, rethink the workflow which is introducing so many new bugs, and slowly start fixing old bugs. The alternative is that your code will inevitably degrade into 100% bugs and become completely unusable and unmaintainable.
Unfortunately, in the real world, # of bugs solved per unit time does not scale linearly with # of developers - and, you eventually reach enough people that you can't effectively coordinate changes without wasting more time on processes than you're gaining by adding another person.
I've never worked at Apple and I don't know anyone on the Photos team, but I imagine a company at that scale probably has a good idea as to the optimal number of developers working on one application. Optimal to Apple probably involves optimal money spent:money earned ratio, not most bugs fixed per unit time, but I would wager those numbers are pretty similar anyways.
The most viable free options on windows seem to be sketchy cloud stuff designed to be inconvenient enough to upsell you. On Linux it's either built in already or trivial to install something that records locally and doesn't rug pull the user demanding money.
This mentality is all over BigTech: This bug didn't block release X-1, why should it block release X? So, it inevitably just sits in the backlog forever. If your releases are 90 days apart, any bug found has an average of 45 days to be fixed, or it ends up on the "we lived with it last time" list.
“This bug didn't block release X-1, why should it block release X?” Is actually a pretty strong argument and tough, but not impossible, to counter.
And the bug backlog only gets longer with time. It’s the price of greatly increased software complexity.
There is one more thing that gets factored into the bug triage. If the bug affects professional users (as in, data corruption from external media) - fuck them. Apple couldn't care less about professional users. The priority is to fix Photos.app for utility gauge pics and preferably in HEIC and other default settings.
This is unfortunately still true. I've had some radars de-prioritized with this exact reason and there are few things more infuriating.
It's really a sign of an overwhelmed, dysfunctional organization, but I heard from an ex-CoreOS guy that that's an intentional management choice, "people perform better under pressure"... (although I'm guessing Photos is not in the CoreOS org)
I use it as a remote control to adjust volume during movies from the phone to the computer playing them for instance.
They could really benefit from how Google does it on Android and decouple it. Push updates to their first party apps via the app store like everyone else, and let the OS update on its own separate schedule.
In Sonoma or Sequoia they started bundling all Safari updates with macOS, but right now Safari 26 appeared as a separate update in Sonoma/Sequoia—-and it will likely stay that way.
Each thing separately can be explained, but when put together it’s somewhat messy..
For example, I'm probably not going to be upgrading to Tahoe until Sequoia's close to end of support life. I just upgraded to Sequoia last month from Ventura (decided to skip Sonoma since the various anecdotes of Sequoia made it sound like Sonoma-with-AI, with few apps breaking because of some new API change).
https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2025/8/7.html
Edit: accidentally called sysdiagnose a spindump.
I start my first day @ Apple in a few weeks, so I ACK that my opinion might be a little biased here.
(Yes, this came close to killing someone close to me. Fortunately someone else happened to come along to help.)
I don't recall there ever being any official language about "squeezing both sides of the phone" to make emergency calls. Doesn't the feature description in Settings explicitly reference which buttons to press?
In case of emergency, use your iPhone to quickly and easily call for help and alert your emergency contacts (provided that cellular service is available). After an emergency call ends, your iPhone alerts your emergency contacts with a text message, unless you choose to cancel. Your iPhone sends your current location (if available) and—for a period of time after you enter SOS mode—your emergency contacts receive updates when your location changes.
Note: If you have iPhone 14 or later (any model), you may be able to contact emergency services through satellite if cell service isn’t available. See Use Emergency SOS via satellite on your iPhone.
Simultaneously press and hold the side button and either volume button until the sliders appear and the countdown on Emergency SOS ends, then release the buttons.
Or you can enable iPhone to start Emergency SOS when you quickly press the side button five times. Go to Settings > Emergency SOS, then turn on Call with 5 Presses.
Even if it's standard among tech giants, you could be the one that makes a new standard! Good luck in your new role, btw.
I don't think my bank had intended to make passwords optional, and the third-party administrator of their bug bounty program agreed, when creating the report, but once it made it to the bank, it was up to them to decide if it was or was not a bug.
I've had pretty good luck reporting bugs to Google (notoriously bad!):
1. provide simple, crystal clear examples that cannot be due to third parties, misconfiguration or user error.
2. show that it's happening to a large number of mainstream users (not niche)
3. show that it breaks critical workflows and has no easy workaround (incl partial workarounds).
4. if you meet #1-3, then wait 6-9 months minimum (more if hard to fix). If not, wait 3-5+ years.
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Favorite example: in the mid-2000s, I caught google maps confusing suite/apt numbers for street numbers. It got flagged as low priority. So, to get the team's attention, I reproduced the bug on a large Google offices. Six month later, bug fixed.
After that experience, I report everything to Google that breaks my workflow. Like clockwork, the biggies get fixed a couple of quarters later.
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Want long? Try improving/fixing core issues with the API design of Linux or PostgreSQL: fix times can be measured in decades. Backward compatibility is insufficient - they rightfully worry about libraries and tools adopting the new APIs and then breaking legacy systems that cannot be upgraded even for mission-critical security issues.
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NOTE: OP bug feels P0 and the better strategy is either mass media (incl HN) or networking to someone inside the company. I've hit those too over the years and can usually find someone at the company to send directly.
They also used to let anyone add any gmail address to a Google Groups group, and send out unfilterable spam as a message from that group.
This was financed by equally massive technical debt.
That’s what technical debt is. It’s the cost for moving forward quickly. I’m not sure I understand what you’re trying to state.
You seem to be assuming that the company will eventually pay off the technical debt rather than just continue accumulating it and lowering production quality.
From your description, your experience is quite typical.
Support asked me to let them know when a contact vanishing did so they could gather logs from me phone.
Once I was finally able to see it happen, I reached out. Reported that it had just happened overnight. The customer support said it was too long of a time frame for engineers to investigate because "it generates a lot of logs and that's too much to go through". I could not believe their answer.
I just moved my contacts to Gmail and that was the end of it.
Hm. That is more than I ever got, but I also never bothered to report anything to any company after being ignored the first tries.
Once you have market power (which means different things for different companies) you can safely feed the tech debt monster just as little as you feel like.
There were certain photographers and publications, that, if they got upset, all hands were on deck, for even the most innocuous bugs.
Btw I wonder if Apple sends some spoken message to the emergency services or some metadata or just connects the phones and that's it.
Edit: oh and I forgot: my wife got a loud message (that bypassed DND) telling her that her father maybe felt, because she is one of his emergency contacts.
Also, you may not be aware of Car Crash Detection https://support.apple.com/en-us/104959
From https://9to5mac.com/2023/02/03/iphone-crash-detection-critic...
“My whole day is managing crash notifications,” said Trina Dummer, interim director of Summit County’s emergency services, which received 185 such calls in the week from Jan. 13 to Jan. 22. (In winters past, the typical call volume on a busy day was roughly half that.) Ms. Dummer said that the onslaught was threatening to desensitize dispatchers and divert limited resources from true emergencies.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has done a lot as a private organization to raise standards for automotive safety but the statistics they publish that show that larger vehicles are safer than larger vehicles are frequently wrongly interpreted -- in many of the cases where the large vehicle does better it's not that you die in the smaller vehicle but instead get a broken bone. Once something is seen as "life or death" some people will think they have no choice but to spend another $50,000, spew another 20 tons of carbon pollution, etc.
Just pointing this out. It’s easy to see what you actually meant :)
