I am using LRTimelapse 6.5.4, and I recently imported a folder containing 6292 jpg healthy .jpg photo files.

I walked away as the sequence loaded and came back to an error on the screen about a corrupt file.

Now the original file folder is full of corrupted files.

From the 6292 photo files, 5170 are an unrecognisable .jpg~ file, 955 are normal .jpgs and 165 are a .jpg file but registering as a BAK file.

Any ideas what has happened here?

Can this LRT process be reversed to recover my photos?

This post was last modified: 2024-03-08, 10:56 by Gunther.

That's strange and shouldn't happen if your files are fine. If LRTimelapse detects corrupt files, it will offer to move them to another folder. I assume you didn't let it move the files out of the folder and instead tried to save the corrupted files, which might have stalled due to errors and left the bak files.

You should be able to rename the .jpg~ files back to jpg, those are backup files. Also the .bak files. There are numerous tools for batch renaming an Mac (here I guess you could just select all files alltogether in Finder and choose rename) and on windows (there are multiple tools available or just use terminal:

Code:

ren *.jpg~ *.jpg
ren *.bak *.jpg

Copy the files to a second folder before doing any attempts to recover them. It's always a good idea to have a backup.

As I said, there must have been issues with those files before. Check your memory card, card reader etc. And if you again get the message that LRTimelapse found corrupt files, just say yes to the question if it should move them away from the sequence.

Hi Gunther, correct I was able to bulk change the file extensions and recover these files.
I went back and reviewed another folder from the same camera that I had previously ran through LRT successfully a few months back, before the last software update.
This folder has had file extensions randomly changed as well??? BAK and JPG~
How can this be, it was previously filtered successfully in LRT and unwanted photos removed etc.

This post was last modified: 2024-03-09, 13:34 by Gunther.

Unlike with Raw files, where XMP data will be written into sidecar files, for JPGs, unfortunately, Adobe requires XMP data to be embedded into the JPGs.
LRTimelapse takes careful measurements to not corrupt any data and therefore works with backup files.

Basically, when saving a sequence this is what happens for every jpg:

• The new JPG is being saved into file.jpg~
  
• The original file file.jpg is being renamed to file.jpg.bak
  
• The new JPG is being renamed from file.jpg~ to file.jpg
  
• Only if everything was successful, file.jpg.bak will be deleted.
  

This is the most secure way to do it in order to prevent any data loss.

In your case there might be something interfering with the save process, making the file write or renaming operations fail.
This could be a virus scanner or kind of "security software" blocking LRTimelapse from writing, it could be a faulty drive, or something else. I can only guess here, without being able to look into the log file after such an error happend.

I'd recommend that you whitelist LRTimelapse in any Virus Scanner or "Security"-Software (it's a good idea in terms of performance anyway). Please keep monitoring what is happening, if you work with JPGs. If such an error occurs, you should also get an error message popping up telling you that there were errors while writing the XMP data. Also there will be detailed logging in the log. If you get such errors in the future, please send me the log from the info menu / show log.

You should try to figure out, what is causing those access problems.
In any case, you won't lose data, because the backup files will still be there and you can recover the JPGs by renaming them back as I explained in my first answer.

As a last recommendation: if you can, work with Raw files. They have only advantages in terms of editing and processing will be much faster also.

Will do, thanks for the support.

Regarding Raw files, most of my time lapse systems are remotely monitored and periodically upload photos to galleries for clients to view. I also record several thousand images from each system so processing raw images just means extra storage and processing time which isn't required when my final product might zoom through them all in a matter of seconds.

I've improved error handling and added some more debug output in 6.5.5 beta 1. Please install that and let me know, if you experience any issues in the future.
https://lrtimelapse.com/download/beta/