Apple Photos app corrupts images
tenderlovemaking.com959 points by pattyj 14 hours ago
959 points by pattyj 14 hours ago
It seems to be an import pipeline bug.
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.
This is also my guess. It's really a bummer, and I'd report it to Apple but since it's nondeterministic I have no idea how to provide repro steps.
I have had extremely bad luck, reporting bugs to Apple.
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.
They asked me for a sysdiagnose when I complained about how crappy their new Finder disk icon looks on macOS 26. See this rant by Jeff Johnson, who called for a boycott on filing bugs with Apple a couple years back (I stuck to the boycott except for two obvious UI design issues in the latest OS because neither required repro steps (so why the sysdiagnose?)).
https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2025/8/7.html
Edit: accidentally called sysdiagnose a spindump.
Not to hand wave-- but this feels industry standard IMO. I have a dozen PRs sitting unacknowledged and stale across a handful of FAANG (and other) repos, including Apple's.
I start my first day @ Apple in a few weeks, so I ACK that my opinion might be a little biased here.
Maybe you can help bump FB13400242, a bug that is _literally_ going to kill people. (The bug is that to make an emergency call, even from lock screen, you're supposed to be able to squeeze buttons on either side of the phone. But it only works with the volume buttons on the left - the Action button didn't get supported, when that button was added. So now the rule for teaching a small child isn't just "squeeze both sides" it's "oh but not that one!")
(Yes, this came close to killing someone close to me. Fortunately someone else happened to come along to help.)
Consider hitting up some Apple "watcher" people (e.g. 9to5mac) to see if they can give you a boost on their social media. It's pretty obnoxious that it's come to needing to make a stink like that to get eyeballs on something, but here we are.
This definitely works. When I was at Apple I remember a number of issues in their weekly “bug review board” were classified as being high priority because they were going viral on Twitter.
Here's the official Apple Information on how to do this:
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.
> you're supposed to be able to squeeze buttons on either side of the phone. But it only works with the volume buttons on the left
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?
A bug that has been reported that is down prioritized that then leads to killing people would be a pretty bad case for Apple when it came to court.
I'm decades away from being a small child and I can't remember these gestures. The only time I get screenshots or activate emergency mode on my phone is accidentally. Of course I also don't expect my phone to be able to help me much in an emergency.
Well, not an Apple fan personally but on this they are just top of class. Even if this story involves an Apple Watch and not an iPhone, my father-in-law some time ago fainted (due to an underlying heart issue we late uncovered), knocked his head on the toilet when he got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. He lost consciousness for a brief moment and when he regained it, there was already someone from the emergency line speaking through the Apple Watch and he got the ambulance at home faster that without wearing the Apple Watch, and surely helped in saving his life.
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.
My phone is off at night and I don't have a watch. I try not to let these huge companies FUD me into thinking that I appreciably change my odds of surviving an accident by buying their technology, but I get that others see it differently.
Maybe you want to rethink that? You're literally responding to a testimonial that it likely saved someone's life. Seconds do matter in some medical emergencies.
Also, you may not be aware of Car Crash Detection https://support.apple.com/en-us/104959