Apple Photos app corrupts images

I’ve been seeing this happen on older photos that had imported properly, and I just use my iPhone and view photos on my Mac and iPhone. Looking back, I’ve lost whole chunks of my photo library. It’s a bigger problem than I realized. I don’t have these backed up elsewhere.

I used to see this when I had iCloud Photo Library turned on. It randomly corrupted old photos that were correct. It corrupted both photos taken on the iPhone and photos imported from a real camera.

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.

You work in IT right? always backup

How long do you keep your backups? A backup taken last night is great if your computer gets hit by a bus, but isn't so great if you just discovered that photos you took ten years ago were corrupted sometime between then and now.

The solution to that is rolling backups with different tiers.

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.