Lightroom problem with partial images importing

[PruettPhoto]

I was wondering if anyone else is having this problem. I've done tons of searches on the web and just cant find any information on this.

When I import images from my Sandisk Ultra II and Extreme III 2GB cards, some will not display as full images. Only a small portion of the image comes in and the rest of the image space is white. With some half of the image is missing others only a small square portion comes in or some it's a small sliver of image that makes it through to the Library. These wedding pictures from yesterday I'm importing now and this has happened on 3 of the 7 cards so far. I still have 2 more cards to import. This happened to me on the last wedding and I was able to use the Sandisk recovery program to get the images back to normal from one card.

These today seem to be fine in Photoshop CS3 but not in Lightroom. It's not every image, thank goodness, but there's no pattern or logic to which ones import 'bad'. In the last wedding batch the bad Lightroom images were also bad in CS3 so I was thinking the card was bad, but this time the images seem ok in CS3, but not Lightroom and images on 3 different cards are messed up.

Any ideas or suggestions?

[PruettPhoto]

Guess I'm the oddball with this problem. Looks like I'll be buying a bunch of new compact flash cards. Hard to believe that 5 out of 8 cards went bad at the same time though and one card is only 2 months old.

[John_G_Walter]

Originally Posted by PruettPhoto

I was wondering if anyone else is having this problem. I've done tons of searches on the web and just cant find any information on this.

When I import images from my Sandisk Ultra II and Extreme III 2GB cards, some will not display as full images. Only a small portion of the image comes in and the rest of the image space is white. With some half of the image is missing others only a small square portion comes in or some it's a small sliver of image that makes it through to the Library. These wedding pictures from yesterday I'm importing now and this has happened on 3 of the 7 cards so far. I still have 2 more cards to import. This happened to me on the last wedding and I was able to use the Sandisk recovery program to get the images back to normal from one card.

These today seem to be fine in Photoshop CS3 but not in Lightroom. It's not every image, thank goodness, but there's no pattern or logic to which ones import 'bad'. In the last wedding batch the bad Lightroom images were also bad in CS3 so I was thinking the card was bad, but this time the images seem ok in CS3, but not Lightroom and images on 3 different cards are messed up.

Any ideas or suggestions?

I have not had any import problems with Lightroom, although early on in 1.0, I had a LOT of problems with LR corrupting its database. Even then, it never corrupted an image file. Are your files corrupt on the card, as the result of the import, or the camera?

It sounds like you have not really isolated the problem? Have you looked at the image files that were imported with an application other than LR or PS? How about the backup files? (if you backed up during import, which I think is one of the best features of the LR import routine)

[PruettPhoto]

The images are fine when viewed in microsoft explorer raw viewer. I don't think I've tried just copying them directly from the cards to my hard drive using my card reader before importing into Lightroom. I can use Sandisk recovery program to access the complete images but the problem with that is every card's image starts with #1 and working with 8 cards it's a pain making 8 different folders for them so they aren't overwritten. Out of 1300 images there are only 10 that need recovering but on different cards. Very time consuming. At this time I haven't found the cause of this unique problem and it didn't start happening until a month or two ago. I'm hoping to move more towards portraits instead of weddings so it won't be as big a deal then but for now this is a major pain and adding tons of hours to my post production time for weddings.

[John_G_Walter]

Originally Posted by PruettPhoto

The images are fine when viewed in microsoft explorer raw viewer. I don't think I've tried just copying them directly from the cards to my hard drive using my card reader before importing into Lightroom. I can use Sandisk recovery program to access the complete images but the problem with that is every card's image starts with #1 and working with 8 cards it's a pain making 8 different folders for them so they aren't overwritten. Out of 1300 images there are only 10 that need recovering but on different cards. Very time consuming. At this time I haven't found the cause of this unique problem and it didn't start happening until a month or two ago. I'm hoping to move more towards portraits instead of weddings so it won't be as big a deal then but for now this is a major pain and adding tons of hours to my post production time for weddings.

OK....some questions.

1. What kind of camera? I would start with their proprietary viewer. 'Nikon View' is free to download. I imagine other camera's versions are as well.

2. What version of Lightroom? Current version is 1.2, and there have been vast operational improvements since 1.0.

3. Is "Render Standard-Sized Previews" checked in the Import dialog? Either way should only affect your viewing speed of the image in LR, but there could be some glitch in the rendering process depending on which is chosen.

AND

4. Why is each card's files starting at #1? That just seems like a disaster waiting to happen. Even though I personally never reset my camera's numbering, I can understand why you might do it from job to job. But from card to card?

I also don't understand why you need to use the recovery program if the images look Ok outside of LR? LR doesn't touch the actual image file, so it should not have damaged it. It sounds like you have a problem with the rendered thumbnails.

How about the backup files? Are you creating them on import? Are they OK?

[PruettPhoto]

1) Canon 5D & 20D both set to RAW.
2) Lightroom 1.2
3) Render Standard View is selected
4) Images are set for continuous numbering in both cameras. The Sandisk recovery program renumbers the recovered images starting at #1 for every disk. Yes, that is a problem but no way to change the Sandisk default.

This seems to be a random problem. Most files are fine with the exception of a few. Out of 1300 images I had about 32 that didn't properly import into Lightroom and they also open 'damaged' in Photoshop CS3. Only after running the Sandisk recovery program can I import the repaired/retrieved files into Lightroom without damage. Thumbnail versions of all files look fine in Windows Explorer.

Canon RAW Viewer (Digital Photo Professional 2.0.1.4), the thumbnails look fine however, when I double-click the images I get an error message that 'the file is corrupted' and it will not open.

[Ken Krehbiel]

Crystal, have you tried a new card reader; or are you using multiple readers? How fast(old) is your computer? It seems doubtful that 5 of 8 cards would croak at the same time. Your problem seems hardware oriented, but I would use different software for downloading, not Lightroom. I gave up on downloading in Lightroom, just too frustrating and unreliable when downloading more than one card at a time. Never had the problem you have, though. Now I download using Photo Mechanic, then import the folder into Lightroom.