I posted this to Twitter earlier today, but thought I’d add it here for posterity…
Last week I mentioned that I had been yelling about Apple a lot on here lately and was going to try and be more positive. But allow me one more thought before I shut up…
We went on vacation this past week. Before we left I updated my phone to iOS 12.3 – my wife remained on the previous version. (This is where you all collectively go “uh-oh”.)
Spent five days at a state park shooting tons of video of the kids swimming, hiking, fishing, playing with their grandparents, etc. Irreplaceable stuff.
Get home, back on WiFi, start uploading everything to iCloud and Google Photos. After an hour or two everything’s synced.
Problem: All videos, of any length, stutter, stall, and skip frames in both Photos.app (macOS) and Google Photos on every Mac I try. Completely unwatchable. Time to debug things.
I export the raw files out of Photos.app to Finder and try opening with QuickTime. Same problem. Next, I use Photos.app to import directly from my phone via USB. Still broken.
But they play fine on iOS, so I never noticed any problems while filming last week.
Investigate further. It’s only MY videos that are broken. Videos my wife took are fine. Remember: I’m on 12.3. She’s on whatever 12.2 release was before.
All those videos of my kids? Gone.
This is a core competency of iOS that should never, ever fucking break for any reason. Apple markets iPhone’s camera as a top selling point – if not THE selling point.
Lucky for me, I’m tech savvy enough to know about Image Capture.app buried inside macOS’s Utilities folder. So I give it one last try using that to transfer the corrupted videos manually off my phone and into Photos.app and Google Photos.
It works. My memories are safe.
But would a normal Apple customer have thought to try that? Would an Apple Genius have figured it out? (Assuming they could even get an appointment.)
No. They would have simply lost everything.
This is fucking inexcusable on Apple’s part. DO NOT fuck with me when it comes to my photo library.
Apple needs to get off their goddamned pedestal, stop hosting self-congratulatory Lady Gaga concerts, and fix their fucking QA process, years-old bugs, and keyboards.
On the bright side, while I may never be able to trust Apple again with my photos (or type vowels on their laptops), at least they’re about to roll out a new credit card and custom-branded television content.
Courage.