Newly Discovered macOS Image Capture Bug Can Fill Up Hard Drives With Empty Data (macrumors.com) 25
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MacRumors: A bug has been discovered in Apple's macOS Image Capture app that needlessly eats up potentially gigabytes of storage space when transferring photos from an iPhone or iPad to a Mac. Discovered by the developers of media asset management app NeoFinder and shared in a blog post called "Another macOS bug in Image Capture," the issue occurs when Apple's Mac tool converts HEIF photos taken by iOS to more standard JPG files. This process happens when users uncheck the "Keep Originals" option in Image Capture's settings, which converts the HEIC files to JPG when copied to Mac. However, the app also inexplicably adds 1.5MBs of empty data to every single file in the process.
It's worth noting that the bug only occurs when transferring photos from Apple devices, not when importing photos from digital cameras using Image Capture. NeoFinder's team says it has notified Apple of the bug, and the developers suggest anyone plagued by the issue can try using a new beta version of the third-party utility Graphic Converter, which includes an option to remove the unwanted empty data from the JPEG files.
It's worth noting that the bug only occurs when transferring photos from Apple devices, not when importing photos from digital cameras using Image Capture. NeoFinder's team says it has notified Apple of the bug, and the developers suggest anyone plagued by the issue can try using a new beta version of the third-party utility Graphic Converter, which includes an option to remove the unwanted empty data from the JPEG files.
They should have just used the leftpad module (Score:1, Insightful)
Node.js developers solved this issue by creating a leftpad module to duplicate Javascript core language functionality, but with added network dependencies and non-determinism.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
So what you're saying is Michael Jackson was racist against himself.
Re: (Score:2)
Not sure why you would opt to "uncheck originals" (Score:1, Interesting)
That is an annoying bug for sure, but who out there is unchecking "keep originals" anyway? I shudder to have a device arbitrarily wipe away the original raw image at some point... it's not that much more data use to keep originals around;
Re: Not sure why you would opt to "uncheck origina (Score:2)
The "raw data" in this case are HEIC files (based on HEVC), which are significantly smaller than JPEGs. It's a choice of one or the other with Image Capture. Outside the Apple eco-system, support for HEIC has been weak, which I suppose is why some people convert them to JPEG on import by unchecking "keep originals". Personally I find it easy enough to use the 'sips' command if I want JPEGs later. Exiftool also supports the format. HEICs are superior in more ways than just size, so generally I will keep
Re: Not sure why you would opt to "uncheck origin (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
And just to expand on my previous comment: in no way is a HEIC "raw data". It's just another rendering. It still suffers from the same problems prevalent on all phones: over-processing and over-saturation. The HDR, background blurring and noise reduction can be pretty brutal, irrspective of the image encoding used in the rendering. At the end of the day, most people don't seem to give a shit about the raw data as they seem quite happy sharing via WhatsApp, which down-rezzes and recompresses to JPEG at a
Still learning (Score:2, Insightful)
Because Mac computers have huge storage by default (Score:3, Funny)
And even if you wanted more upgrading your device to add storage is simple.
Plus when you buy a new one upgrading to the next level of storage is a bargain since the company enjoys such large economies of scale with their suppliers they can pass on the savings to the customer.
Not to mention the very competitive prices they charge for their cloud storage product it is a bargain compared to all the other companies in the industry.
I'm sure that any patch they roll out will include tools to fix the files it already bloated. They would have no incentive not to fix the problem they created.
Re: (Score:2)
Package managers for languages have got this beat! (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
A full sized butterfly keyboard that is permanently g,ued to the phone so that when it jams you have to surrender it to a genius and accept whatever refurb device they choose to exchange for your original.
very odd (Score:2)
0x00 ? What is that process doing during transfer ? Is it allocating/reserving space for the size of the file being transferred, then zero it out. After allocated and zeroed the file overwrites that space ? No wonder people complain about MAC iphone battery life
Looks like the bug runs away during allocation, if my guess is correct
Graphic Converter (Score:4, Interesting)
Great application. I've been using it for decades to xfer files and clean up images. It's clean, it's easy, it's powerful and you can expect predictable results. Haven't had any need of Adobe $$$. Here's a shoutout to Thorsten Lemke for all his good work!
Sorry for the Slashvertisement, but he and Graphic Converter deserve it.
Re: (Score:2)
> Sorry for the Slashvertisement, but he and Graphic Converter deserve it.
Wow, I'm not a Mac user anymore, but back in the System 7 days, that was an indispensable app. What a great example of keeping a product going longer than almost any corporate app.
I suppose the secret is competence, which appears to be shown by it already having a fix for a just-published bug.
Every other pitch I've heard (Score:2)
I'm shocked that nobody has pitched the "best compression algorithm ever" to compress iOS image files using a "special" run length encoding scheme.
I have seen something like this before on OSX (Score:2)
Does this exist on Catalina? (Score:3)
Image Capture does not show the "Keep Originals" option on either of my Catalina systems. I remember looking at it in the past and Image Capture showing the file names and sizes of the listed photos and movies changing as it was toggled on and off. Has Apple remove this feature?
Easy enough to convert them to JPEG anyway:
sips -s format jpeg -s formatOptions 100 IMG_1234.HEIC --out IMG_1234.jpg