Help! What is causing this?

Hi guys,

Just came back from my trip, imported my pictures to LR to find most of them like this.
Is this a fault of my sd card or gpu?
Has anyone experianced anything like this before?

What's your advice?

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How are you importing them, with a usb cable or a card reader?

It looks like some sort of corruption on the card or (hopefully) in the transfer process - change usb cables or card reader etc. see if it makes a difference.

I assume the files are still on the card? If so can you read them directly from the card OK?

I've seen this twice. Once it turned out to be card related and the other time PC related. The card issue was a Lexar card. I had no issues with the card in my Nikon, but two different Canon cameras had the problem. I was never able to recover the images.

The second time it was an issue with Vista. When I would download all looked well, but when I tried re-reading the image, it was corrupted. I was eventually able to recover by re-downloading the files.

Looks like data corruption on the card or in the transfer process to me. If you view the images on the camera's LCD, do they look like this, as well?

Ok,

Gosh! that really scared the... out of me!

I've copied the pics again directly from my card ( camera to PC via usb, opened the folder on the card, copy and paste to desktop and import to LR) so far so good.

So what is your diagnosis and what shall I do to avoid that in the future?

You're golden guys!

Thanks a lot!

OOOOOOOOOOOOHH NOOOOOOOO!!!

Problem just reoccured!!

This time different pictures are affected!

What is causing this?

This must be a nightmare!

When I look at them in a GRID VIEW they're getting 'infected' as I'm viewing them.

Use a card reader and/or a different USB cable

I suspect you may need to either A) format your current card or B) get a new card. If they're copying over corrupted, they're likely getting stored badly.

You might also try importing directly to LR from the camera. Maybe something is getting unhappy in the copy/paste/import loop

Whenever I've seen this before it usually indicates that a hard drive is failing. If I were you I'd go out and get a new drive and back up the current one immediately.

tommmy.star wrote in post #12414543
This must be a nightmare!

When I look at them in a GRID VIEW they're getting 'infected' as I'm viewing them.

I have seen many cases where the embedded jpg was ok although the RAW data was corrupt. The camera's LCD review looks good because it uses the jpg and the first display in LR is also the jpg until it is replaced after a couple seconds by LR's conversion from the RAW. If that conversion is affected it's a sign the RAW data is corrupt. Most likely perp, the card.

PixelMagic wrote in post #12414788
Whenever I've seen this before it usually indicates that a hard drive is failing. If I were you I'd go out and get a new drive and back up the current one immediately.

Well, don't know what to think. Hard drive failure? that would be really unlucky as this 's happened on both drives I have.

If its happening with photos on more than one drive its unlikely to be a problem with the drives.

Have you tried a new memory card? if you did, does the problem persist?

I'll try to put into a nutshell the most-often causes:

Corrupt memory card,
Corruption from the card reader,
Faulty USB cables (this really does occasionally happen and should be the first thing checked 'cause it is simple and easy to replace and is cheapest),
Corruption on the hard drive, which you can check out by using another hard drive to download to and see if this goes away.

Like I said, those are the most-often causes I've seen. Of course people are also quick to suspect/blame "the camera did it", but I've not seen that as common over the years.

One thing you can check in the camera is whether or not you have a bent CF pin or pins from a card being improperly inserted/pushed in. Although this typically causes things to just refuse to work, it is a quick check.

If you've gone through all the peripheral stuff, then you may need to look at something in the system. JJ mentioned a problem with Vista, and in fact I just recently heard that Vista does maybe have some glitches regarding USB, but I don't have any "hard facts". USB ports could themselves have trouble, as well as USB drivers, but like I said these are the "less common" things.