# Lightroom displaying and exporting corrupt image, but raw file is not corrupt



## orly (Jun 26, 2013)

Hi,

First post on here, so be gentle if this is a well known issue please 

I have used LR for about 5 years and have never seen an issue like this:




I am using LR 4.4 (64bit) on Windows 7.  I have a fairly large library (45,000 photos).  I was working on a set of Canon 5d MkIII (latest firmware) raw photos recently imported.  They are stored on a Linux server with samba file shares.  The LR database is stored locally on the windows desktop on a flash (SSD) C: drive.  The LR image cache is on a separate spinning disk also local to the windows machine.


When I went to re-edit the files a few days after working on them (which definitely looked fine at 100% zoom first time round) I noticed that a few photos look corrupted.  There are pink rectangles in the top right of the image.  The image "damage" is slightly different looking on the different affected photos and also appears when zoomed to 100%.  The "corruption" also appears if I export as a JPEG.


I thought the linux file server must have corrupted the .CR2 files, but when I rename the image files and then reimport them into LR they are fine.


I would be grateful if you could give me some guidance please?


Rebooting either the desktop or the file server makes no difference to the appearance of the "corruption", but renaming and reimporting the files always seems to fix the issue.


Thanks


Olly.
.


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## orly (Jun 26, 2013)

Not trying to answer my own question - but could it be corruption in the local (windows machine) cache?

Thanks

Olly.
.


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## orly (Jun 26, 2013)

No... Purged the cache, and to be sure deleted the contents of the cache directory.  Still showing as corrupt on the original import, and fine on the second.  See the filmstrip view here: http://www2.essenet.co.uk/lightroom-problem/side-by-side.jpg

(the images don't look quite the same as I had cropped the original (corrupted) version and adjusted exposure etc)


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## Victoria Bampton (Jun 26, 2013)

Hi Olly, welcome to the forum!  That certainly is a weird one!  When you export the photo that's no longer corrupted, the corruption doesn't reappear?


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## ukbrown (Jun 26, 2013)

LR does not overwrite anything in the original raw files ever. 
Re impolrt would support this hypothesis

Other people would say memory corruption, I say no way as the chances of a computer booting and running with faulty RAM is very, very slim, they normally crash

Copy the raw file locally and repoint you catalog at the local copy, do this on a photo that already is corrupted, is it still corrupted.
Is the corruption consistent, if you go in and out of LR and export a photo does it always look the same.

Not much help but I think it could be a local disk issue and the above might help


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## orly (Jun 27, 2013)

Victoria - yes, exporting a reimported raw means no corruption appears.

UKBrown - The raw file is definitely good.   In fact I pulled a copy back from my offsite backup and it has an identical md5 checksum to the "corrupt" version.  I believe the issue is certainly with Lightroom.  What I don't understand is that once I have purged the LR cache, why is it still showing corrupt when I zoom to 100%?  Where is the copy of the image being pulled from?  I assumed that it would be read from the original raw file, but if so why is it still showing as corrupted when I have proved the file is in good shape?  To answer your questions - when I copy the file and reimport there is no corruption.  I can't try re-exporting a corrupt image again as I accidentally deleted the corrupt versions working too late last night..  Before that though I also upgraded to LR5. It was still being shown as corrupt.



Thanks for your replies.  I will see if it happens again.  When it first happened I was quite worried and did filesystem consistency checks on the linux server, but as my original RAW is intact I won't lose any data - it's just annoying to have to reimport.

Olly.
.


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## ukbrown (Jun 27, 2013)

OK, it is very weird, not sure it is lightroom pe se, still looks like some form of corruption of the output.  Good luck


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## Mark Sirota (Jun 28, 2013)

Which "LR cache" did you clear? This sounds more like a problem with the Camera Raw cache than with the preview cache.


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## Stugt40 (Jul 9, 2013)

Hi, Orly

I have exactly the same thing - I had it with LR4 so I upgraded to 5 and it does the same thing as on your film strip. I just returned from a trip to Sri Lanka and imported 3500 images - about 1 in 30 have this corruption but I find that as I edit individual images, then more suddenly get the same corruption. This only started happening with LR 4.4. If I re-import the image is still corruped ( I guess it's in some cache somewhere ) but if I re-name the image and import that - no problems. Did you ever get an answer to this ? It's very frustrating. I also found that if I tried to open the file that has been corrupted in Lightroom, in CS5, then it's got the same problem ( see SNIPS above ) - the original RAW file is still fine when viewed in Windows file viewer.

I am using Win 7 64 bit ( have used this with LR3, 4 and 5 )

This does seem to be a real repeatable problem.

Thanks


Stuart


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## albasdad (Nov 20, 2013)

I don't know if this issue has been finally resolved but I have noticed a similar behaviour of LR 4.4 when EXPORTING JPEG file (Windows 7, 64-bit) ..at the beginning the file looks fine and can be viewed using external viewers but after a while some files become corrupted and cannot be opened anymore. I have started digging and discovered that this happens only when I export to my main disk (which is an SSD disk). If I export to a regular Hard Disk (magnetic) this never happens. Does LR have some delayed writes? Buffer flushing?
It is really strange 

thanks

andre


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## Victoria Bampton (Nov 22, 2013)

Hi Andre, welcome to the forum!  If the files are originally ok and later go bad, you may have a problem with the SSD drive.


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## albasdad (Nov 22, 2013)

Victoria Bampton said:


> Hi Andre, welcome to the forum!  If the files are originally ok and later go bad, you may have a problem with the SSD drive.




Correct - originally the files are perfect...and after some time (can be very short or up to a few minutes) they get corrupted. Not all the files though!
I have absolutely no other problems with the SSD - only in LR export, so it's really strange. I was curious if anybody also used SSD and saw similar issue.

thanks and regards


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## Victoria Bampton (Nov 23, 2013)

So just to confirm - you're opening the exported JPEG files in other software to start with, and they're fine (not just looking at the thumbnails?) and then they get corrupted?


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## albasdad (Nov 23, 2013)

Correct...I open the exported JPEG files either in Windows Viewer or Photoshop or another viewer (IRFAN) and at first they are OK and then, after some time, if I open them, they are corrupted and the programs cannot open them anymore. Not all the files but there is no order or sequence (that I was able to observe). If I export to an external (magnetic) disk, all works fine and if I copy the exported files from the external disk to the internal SSD, all works perfectly well. So it's really the export from LR to SSD that creates this strange behavior.

thanks and best regards

andre


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## Victoria Bampton (Nov 23, 2013)

Ok, one more thing you could test to confirm it's the SSD - using Windows (not Lightroom), copy some of the exported files from the external disk to the SSD and see if the same happens to them.


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## albasdad (Nov 23, 2013)

that's what I have described in my previous posting
" if I copy the exported files from the external disk to the internal SSD, all works perfectly well"
The SSD in Windows works just fine - I had no problems with it in any other programs or data - just LR export.
Weird

andre


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## Victoria Bampton (Nov 23, 2013)

My apologies, I missed that.  How strange - I can't think of anything that would cause that.  It would be worth reporting it on the Official Feature Request/Bug Report Forum in case anyone else can reproduce it.


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## albasdad (Nov 23, 2013)

will d - thanks


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## yinsern (Dec 29, 2015)

Has this issue been solved? I'm getting the exact same problem now. The only thing I can think of is my SSD which is brand new.

Apart from that, I'm keeping redundant copies of these files on my NAS an whatever external hard drives I can find!


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## albasdad (Dec 30, 2015)

*Still there...*



yinsern said:


> Has this issue been solved? I'm getting the exact same problem now. The only thing I can think of is my SSD which is brand new.
> 
> Apart from that, I'm keeping redundant copies of these files on my NAS an whatever external hard drives I can find!



I still have this issue in LR 6.0...It happens ONLY (!) during export from LR. In all other cases, I have never noticed a problem of corrupted files on my SSD.
I am therefore exporting to a hard disk and then copying onto my SSD.


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## Stugt40 (Dec 31, 2015)

*Solved!!*



yinsern said:


> Has this issue been solved? I'm getting the exact same problem now. The only thing I can think of is my SSD which is brand new.
> 
> Apart from that, I'm keeping redundant copies of these files on my NAS an whatever external hard drives I can find!



Hi

The problem on my PC was caused by a faulty RAM module. There were no other symptoms on the PC other than this. I removed the memory modules and tested them individually using memtest. Once replaced the fault dissapeared. I did lose a few images as my backup software kindly backed up the corrupted file over the saved good one! I now do two backups - one is a regular backup and one is a full archive of all versions of all files.

hope this helps


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## G.H. Reilink (Dec 31, 2015)

Hi everyone!

I have the same problem although somewhat different. I´ve got three pictures where Lightroom 6.3 (standalone) shows 3 horizontal parallel pink lines.
If I load them in other software (DxO eg. or viewers like Faststone) they don´t show up! And if I export them from Lightroom to eg. the Google-Nik-plugins they persist......
In my case it has nothing to do with a SSD because I don´t have one. Weird!

Kind regards and the best wishes for 2016 everyone,

GHR

P.S. its on a Win 10 computer and not Win 7


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## Victoria Bampton (Jan 1, 2016)

You're welcome to send me one of the problem files G.H. Relink and I'll check it here.  (Use www.wetransfer.com to send to [email protected]).  Most other software just uses the embedded preview, which often escapes corruption.  I'd have expected DxO to show it though.


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## G.H. Reilink (Jan 1, 2016)

Victoria Bampton said:


> Most other software just uses the embedded preview, which often escapes corruption.  I'd have expected DxO to show it though.



Hi,

thanks for your reply. First of all I wish you the best for 2016!

I opened one of these files in DxO and now it showed these lines too (although I´m sure that it didn´t in the past). I expect that you are right because of the "embedded preview". So I think this one is solved. The only thing I don´t understand is: shouldn´t the embedded preview show this also? Because if the readout of the sensor has a failure it should be visible in both raw an jpg, or?????

Kind regards

GHR


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## Johan Elzenga (Jan 1, 2016)

G.H. Reilink said:


> Hi,
> 
> thanks for your reply. First of all I wish you the best for 2016!
> 
> I opened one of these files in DxO and now it showed these lines too (although I´m sure that it didn´t in the past). I expect that you are right because of the "embedded preview". So I think this one is solved. The only thing I don´t understand is: shouldn´t the embedded preview show this also? Because if the readout of the sensor has a failure it should be visible in both raw an jpg, or?????



The embedded preview is made from the raw data in the memory of the camera, before anything is written. That's how they can escape a corruption that occurred when the raw data were written to the memory card, or when the image was copied to the hard disk of your computer.


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## orly (Jun 26, 2013)

Hi,

First post on here, so be gentle if this is a well known issue please 

I have used LR for about 5 years and have never seen an issue like this:




I am using LR 4.4 (64bit) on Windows 7.  I have a fairly large library (45,000 photos).  I was working on a set of Canon 5d MkIII (latest firmware) raw photos recently imported.  They are stored on a Linux server with samba file shares.  The LR database is stored locally on the windows desktop on a flash (SSD) C: drive.  The LR image cache is on a separate spinning disk also local to the windows machine.


When I went to re-edit the files a few days after working on them (which definitely looked fine at 100% zoom first time round) I noticed that a few photos look corrupted.  There are pink rectangles in the top right of the image.  The image "damage" is slightly different looking on the different affected photos and also appears when zoomed to 100%.  The "corruption" also appears if I export as a JPEG.


I thought the linux file server must have corrupted the .CR2 files, but when I rename the image files and then reimport them into LR they are fine.


I would be grateful if you could give me some guidance please?


Rebooting either the desktop or the file server makes no difference to the appearance of the "corruption", but renaming and reimporting the files always seems to fix the issue.


Thanks


Olly.
.


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## Jim Wilde (Jan 1, 2016)

It may not be a camera problem at all, it could anything in the pipeline from camera to your hard drive: camera sensor, memory card, connecting cable (if importing directly from the camera, or using an external card reader), card reader, hard drive, system RAM. If you still have the original version of the corrupted images on the memory card you could do some further testing. Or upload one of them to Victoria as she suggested (but not the version on the hard drive) so that she can check it out.


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