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Apple Photos app corrupts images

(tenderlovemaking.com)
1119 points pattyj | 5 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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deviation ◴[] No.45274615[source]
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.

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tenderlove ◴[] No.45274840[source]
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.
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ChrisMarshallNY ◴[] No.45275065[source]
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.

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deviation ◴[] No.45275224[source]
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.

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dmd ◴[] No.45275486[source]
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.)

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SoftTalker ◴[] No.45276732[source]
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.
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darkwater ◴[] No.45277117[source]
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.

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SoftTalker ◴[] No.45277365[source]
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.
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1. KerrAvon ◴[] No.45278923[source]
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

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2. PaulHoule ◴[] No.45280860[source]
To be fair this kind of thing is emotionally manipulative.

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.

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3. bigiain ◴[] No.45286064[source]
Of course, the seconds that matter might be someone else's medical emergency, which your iPhone or Apple Watch is slowing down with false positives.

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.

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4. darkwater ◴[] No.45286684[source]
Yep, this is the other side of the coin for sure. There should probably be some basic training around these features; there will still be many (careless) people that just completely ignore the "are you OK?" question the watch/phone is asking them but maybe the situation would improve.
5. loloquwowndueo ◴[] No.45288276[source]
> larger vehicles are safer than larger vehicles

Just pointing this out. It’s easy to see what you actually meant :)