Question File corruption in Lightroom Classic

Snake79

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I've been having problems with Lightroom Classic where images in the library become corrupted when viewed in the develop module. These corruptions are random as they are appearing on .cr2 raw files as well as .tif and. psd files that are included in the lightroom catalog. This has been occuring for a number of weeks now and only started after upgrading my PC from Windows 7 to Windows 10 in December. I had been using Lightroom on Windows 7 for years and I have never had this problem before. The corruption is permanent as I have opened them in Photoshop and they show the damage to the image. I do have an external hard drive where everything is backed up so the files are not entirely lost.

I've ruled out corrupt SD cards and card reader as it happening to files that I imported years ago and have worked on no problem. I've also ruled out damaged or failing hard disks as this is happening on multiple drives, all of which come back clean when running a disk health checks with different software. I've ran a virus scan across the whole system including all drives which comes back clean too. I've run a memory test which has not found any issues either, although that was a quick check and I plan on doing an extended test tonight.

Initially I thought it was Lightroom that was damaging the files however after doing some research on this I understand Lightroom does not alter the raw files, but changes information in the catalog which is then linked to the file, but the file remains untouched. Another possible option is starting a new catalog, that might work.

If the extended memory test is negative I am out of possible causes and I cannot continue working like this knowing it could happen again at any time. It may be something that is running alongside Lightroom that is interfering so I may turn off all non essential start-up and background tasks. The back-up is run once a week on start up which I let finish before doing any work in Lightroom so I don't think that is the cause. It's very frustrating as I built my PC to be a photo/video editing workstation.

I'm just wondering if anyone else has had a similar issue or knows how to fix it barring a complete system re-install?
 
LR cannot damage a raw file. It treats them as read only and does not alter them.

Try viewing the files in non Adobe software. Do they look OK there? Try a new LR catalogue. It won't take a long time to do and won't affect your current catalogue.

You state the problems only started when you upgrade Windows 7 to 10. Maybe something went screwy during the upgrade? A clean install of Windows 10 is worth a try. If you don't want to do that how about uninstalling LR & PS and re installing them?

Have you looked at the LR settings for using the graphics card? If it is set to use the graphics card turn that off and see what happens. Are all your system drivers up to date?
 
Thanks for the reply.

I ran the extended memory test last night and it came back with no issues found.

I have viewed the corrupt files in Windows picture viewer and the photos app and it shows the corruption too. I haven't used Canon DPP yet but I expect it will also show.

As far as I am aware I am up to date with drivers, I usually update when I get notifications and I check regularly. I have recently changed my graphics card, however I was using it before the Windows 10 upgade and didn't have any problems. I do have full GPU acceleration on in Lightroom but I am using a Quadro P4000 which should have no problems as it is designed for professional applications. I could try switching the GPU enhancements off but I cannot understand how a GPU can corrupt the data on the disk.

As a side note I have rendered video in DaVinci resolve using the GPU and I had no problems, it seems to affect Lightroom only. Lightroom runs very well on my system apart from the file corruption.

It is possible something went wrong during the Windows upgrade that has caused this. I did uninstall Lightroom, restarted the PC and then re-installed but the files were still corrupt and some others also became corrupt later. Crucially I did not remove the catalog as I wanted to see it it was an error in the coding of the application rather than the catalog file. I will create a new catalog and put all new images into that to see what happens. If the catalog was corrupt it did not flag any issues when updating and backing itself up which is usually when it will notify of a problem. But if the catalog does not alter the images how is it responsible for the corruption?

I am thinking of a complete OS re-install which is going to be a pita however it might be my only option. I just want to explore all options before going down that road. It's so annoying as the system runs perfectly fine excluding this.
 
The information you have is correct that Lightroom does not write to or modify the original files, this is not something that can go wrong and start happening it's a core function of Lightroom that it does not modify the original files. I've seen people report corruption in the catalog and that Lightroom is corrupting the original files but in the latter case I've only seen something else at fault, not Lightroom.

What form does the corruption take? What is your process from transferring the files to their storage location and importing into Lightroom? At what point does the corruption start?

With computers anything is possible but with corrupted files in most cases when I've seen it the cause has been the storage media (either the source or destination) or the flash interface, I've not seen it in a while but I occasionally had problems with CF readers. Ram problems tend to cause instability and blue screens and the only issues I've seen with GPU encoding is overly aggressive compression. I'd be surprised if a software reinstall would sort this as it seems too subtle a problem to be caused by an issue within software unless it was a known bug.

I was wondering if there's a problem with the sata driver in Windows causing corruption on writes but I've never seen something like that before and if it was happening, given Windows is modifying system files all the time you'd be seeing much wider corruption problems.

With corruption the first place I normally start is with the old command line tool chkdsk which I find better than other disk checking utilities for showing bad sectors on the drive. Just make sure to run it in read only mode (no /F or /R switches) otherwise it may have the effect of taking a bulldozer to the corrupt files. It should tell you if it think the file system is ok or if it's found errors.

I'd also have a look in the System logs within Event Viewer to see if there are any Disk events logged, if the system is having trouble writing to the disk you'll usually see a large number of errors.
 
As far as I am aware I am up to date with drivers, I usually update when I get notifications and I check regularly. I have recently changed my graphics card, however I was using it before the Windows 10 upgade and didn't have any problems.
Do you get drivers direct from NVIDIA? I would as the ones provided by Windows update are not necessarily the latest. Just because the GPU works correctly in DaVinci doesn't mean it will work correctly in other software. Different software operates differently.
 
Do you get drivers direct from NVIDIA? I would as the ones provided by Windows update are not necessarily the latest. Just because the GPU works correctly in DaVinci doesn't mean it will work correctly in other software. Different software operates differently.

The drivers are direct from Nvidia.

The SD card is taken out of the camera and transfered via a USB 3 card reader. I import the files onto an internal SSD in Lightroom. The files do not corrupt on import as I can view them in the library and in the develp module and work on them. The corruption occurs later, sometimes after 10 mins, sometimes months or years after import.

I will take some screenshots to give you and idea later.
 
Have you viewed the files on another pc? Are they the same? I had issues with cooling on a graphics card a while ago which corrupted the screen rather than the files themselves.
 
Have you viewed the files on another pc? Are they the same? I had issues with cooling on a graphics card a while ago which corrupted the screen rather than the files themselves.

I haven't viewed them on another PC, I could give that a go this weekend.

Due to a Mac upgrade at work I'm no longer able to run CC on my PC. Only two machines can be activated at any one time. I'm getting an iMac Pro to replace a Mac Pro trashcan. Once that is done and the old one will be deactivated and I'll be able to use it again.
 

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