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|| SportsShooter.com: Member Message Board
OSX upgrades 10.3.5 and 10.3.6 and Photo Mechanic
Nate Parsons, Photo Editor, Photographer
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Arnold | MD | USA | Posted: 9:39 PM on 11.21.04 |
->> This isn’t a world wide epidemic, it’s only happened to a few of our staffers.
The Mac OS X upgrades 10.3.5 and 10.3.6 have a bug which effects the Finder and potentially your CF cards and therefore your assignments. Apple is aware of the problem and is working to correct the situation. Here are the things it’s affecting:
If you drag your folder to the Photo Mechanic icon on the dock, there is a greater chance that while you are working on your images, Photo Mechanic will crash deleting everything in that folder. (Completely.) If you feel compelled to drag the folder, hold down the option key as you go, this will create a copy of your files and may not affect the originals. You can also navigate to those folders by opening Photo Mechanic first and using your ‘Favorite Folders’ and ‘Folder Navigator ’sections to the left of your contact sheet.
If you do not eject your card properly, the next card you put into the reader, may be overwritten by Finder with the images you downloaded previously. Finder may not be able to distinguish between what has already been downloaded and what is being downloaded.
Here is what I’ve been told to do:
1. In-jest images into Photo Mechanic as normal. Check to make sure all of your images are there.
2. Quit Photo Mechanic (before you in-jest another card)
3. If you don’t have the ‘un-mount source disks’ box checked, carefully eject the card, make sure it is no longer on the desktop.
4. Restart your Mac.
I was told to burn a disk after step 3, I think that’s a little extreme, do it if you feel like it. Here are some things that I think will help:
Clean off your computers, Applications and Operating Systems work more effectively if they have space to work with.
If you have not already upgraded to 10.3.5 or 10.3.6, don’t. Just maintain.
If you haven’t experienced any problems, great! This isn’t a world wide epidemic, it’s only happened to a few people. |
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Michael Hickey, Photographer
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Kokomo | IN | USA | Posted: 10:27 PM on 11.21.04 |
| ->> Apple really dropped the ball on this upgrade, first the hard drive problems, now this. Hope there's a fix on the way soon. |
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Robert Deutsch, Photographer
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NY | NY | USA | Posted: 4:08 PM on 11.22.04 |
->> The following info is from Dennis Walker, of CameraBits (PhotoMechanic):
"The problem is that people are physically ejecting their camera disks before they are completely unmounted. We are making some changes in PM to wait until the disk is unmounted in the ingest (if that option is checked) before we close the progress dialog. What happens is that sometimes the OS takes several seconds to finish un-mounting the disk, and if you physically remove the disk before this completes, then stick in another disk (or the same disk after reformatting in camera and taking more pictures), then the OS has no clue (or is clueless) and thinks it is the same disk and it can obviously corrupt the data. If you hear reports of people ingesting their disks and almost all photo being corrupt, this is what most likely has happened. You got to make sure that disk is gone from the Desktop before you remove the disk from the reader!!!
For example, lets say you format a disk in your camera and shoot 100 photos numbered from 100-199. You mount this disk and ingest and you get your photos just fine. But then lets say you remove the disk before it is (completely) unmounted, then put the disk into your camera, format, then take another 100 photos numbered 200-299 (assuming your camera is setup to continue file numbers from where it left off). When you put this disk back into the Mac and ingest again, the OS thinks the same set of original photos are on the disk and it will again copy what it thinks are the 100 original files 100-199. Unfortunately, the OS doesn't re-check the FAT/directory on the disk (since it is probably cached in memory), and it blindly tries to copy the files 100-199 as if they were at their original locations on the disk. About half the time this results in the first photo being OK, since both the original number 100 photo and the new number 200 photo start on the same sector and there is roughly a 50-50 chance that the original number 100 photo is longer than the new number 200 photo. However, the number 200 photo on the disk will be called number 100 by the OS, and chances are that most if not all of the remaining photos numbered 201-299 will be corrupt (and numbered 101-199). If, on the other hand, you only shot say 20 photos (200-219) then there is a good chance that the OS will copy the original photos numbered 120 (or maybe 121, 122) through 199 intact (remember, the OS still thinks there are 100 photos on the disk).
So if the above scenario happens, there is a good chance that most of the photos on the disk are still intact as long as all you do is ingest. This finally happened to me once (guess I was in a hurry to shoot more pics), and I was able to recover all of the photos on a PC using PhotoRescue. After I did that, I ran scan disk on the PC and it showed no errors at all. Then I realized what had happened (that all of my corrupt photos had the same file numbers as the previous set of photos on the card), and I was able to put the card back into the Mac (after unplugging/reconnecting the card reader) and all but a few of the first files copied OK on the Mac. I probably could have run PhotoRescue on the Mac as well, but I generally trust a PC to do this type of recovery more than a Mac. So if you ingest using PM and get corrupted files, they are probably still OK on the flash card, so DON'T REFORMAT until you verify the files made it OK.
The suggestions mentioned in the original message are a bit extreme. There shouldn't' be any need to restart the computer. Quitting PM and re-launching shouldn't make any difference at all. Photo Mechanic is NOT deleting every photo on your disk - it is the OS freaking-out because a disk wasn't properly unmounted and was changed "behind the back" of the OS. If you unplug the card reader and re-connect, you can be sure that the OS won't get mixed-up on the next card that is inserted, so if people are paranoid about this, they can unplug the reader first, then remove the camera disk from the reader. I don't see any reason not to upgrade to the latest version of Mac OS X (generally this is a good idea).
And finally, try to resist the temptation to edit straight off the camera disk since you WILL be making changes to the disk if you rotate/tag/caption/rename. Normally this shouldn't be a problem, but let's say you fill the disk by shooting until the disk is completely full (the camera actually wrote to all sectors). If you were to then try and caption all the photos, you will run into problems since there isn't any more room on the disk for your captions! Sounds pretty basic to me, but apparently it isn't so obvious to everyone (other than being extremely SLOW). However, I know that many people DO edit straight from the disk, and this will be OK most of the time (assuming no captioning!!) since the camera usually won't write to the very last free sector, and tagging/rotating only appends data to the end of the files. But captioning photos on your camera disk IS A BAD IDEA!
Kirk also points out that you can use disktool from the Terminal application (in Applications/Utilities) to verify if a disk is still mounted by:
disktool -l
(that's a lowercase L)
This shows all disks that are mounted. If you see your camera disk listed, then it is not yet unmounted. But then, you SHOULD also see it on your Desktop (assuming it isn't completely cluttered and you don't recognize it). If disktool shows the disk mounted and you DON'T see the disk on your Desktop, then there is a real problem here, and Apple should be informed of this (and please let us know too!). Take a screenshot of your Desktop (command-shift-3) after hiding all other windows (e.g F11 on 10.3).
You can also use disktool to un-mount with:
disktool -u deviceName
where deviceName is the device name that appears next to the name of the camera disk. Then do disktool -l again to check that the disk has really been unmounted. I think this is also a bit extreme and not necessary as long as you see that disk icon go bye-bye before you pull the disk!!!
Hopefully this will help..."
--dennis |
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Jake Schoellkopf, Photographer
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Albuquerque | NM | USA | Posted: 5:27 PM on 11.22.04 |
->> I champ at the bit in anticipation of installing these Mac OS updates but I find it's always best to wait and see what bugs crop up in the updates before installing. I usually check http://www.macintouch.com/ and read-up on how the latest OS is working for people. Glad I have waited on 10.3.6!
Jake |
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Nate Parsons, Photo Editor, Photographer
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Arnold | MD | USA | Posted: 3:36 PM on 11.23.04 |
| ->> The problem appeared during navigation while PM is running. Some folks are dragging and dropping folders from the desktop into the PM dock item, these are folders of images that have all ready been downloaded, things appear to run fine but crash a while later during editing. Resulting in the loss of data. The card being ejected early or not being mounted is not part of this problem. We have all our folks ingest into their laptops first and auto unmount. The bug seems to be in OS X updates 10.3.5 and 10.3.6 which came out nearly on top of one another. The drag and drop situation deals with dock and finder issues in OS X. |
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