Lightroom falls over on import every time it encounters a damaged file

As the title says. I'm having a nightmare of a time importing some old files I've just moved back onto my hard drive. I've

got probably 10,000+ images to import and a very small number of them have become corrupted. Problem is that

Lightroom imports a few of the good files and then just stops importing any more and just does nothing. When I get sick

of waiting I click the 'x' to cancel the import, and then it pops up a dialogue with a list of files that it is having trouble

importing. But with no option to ignore them or do anything other than just scratch my head in wonderment of how they

borked the import function so bad. Does anyone know of anyway I can get around this?

<p>I'm not that familiar with Lightroom; so, dumb question: Is there any reason you can't just copy the files from their present location to your hard drive using the computer's copy function (or a third party software equivalent)? Once the files are copied to the HD you can then use Lightroom to find the corrupted files...</p>

They are on the hard drive already. I'm trying to import them into the lightroom catalogue. But there's

virtually no settings to tweak in regards to import. I can't tell it to ignore certain files, and for some reason

the developers didn't have the foresight to get it to ignore files it can't handle. I should point out, I'm on

Lightroom4.

<p>Have you tried opening them in other applications? That should tell you if they are damaged beyond repair or if it is exclusively a Lightroom issue.<br>

<br />Then if you CAN open them in a different application, try saving them to a new file with a new name with the different application. Sometimes that will 'fix' the problem enough so that Lr can import the new versions.<br>

<br />FastStone is a free application that might work. If these are raw files, then you are likely gong to need to develop them to the point of being able to create a 16 bit tif file. RawTherapee is an excellent free raw conversion tool that might work for that.</p>

<p>If you know which files are corrupted, it's very easy to tell LR not to import them. In the import dialog, you just click the box for the ones that are corrupted. Alternatively, since you say it gives you a dialogue with the file names, just move them out of the folder they are in, do the import, and move them back if you care.</p>

<p>Have you tried using the sync command instead of the actual import command? My experience with Lightroom 4 and files it can't handle is that it continues the import just fine and then spits out a list of files it did not import.</p>

It seems to throw up a random, and small, selection of allegedly corrupted images/videos each time I click

the 'x' to cancel the import after it has seemingly stalled. So I can't get a definitive list out of it as to what it

thinks is corrupted. It's different every time. And there's 10 or 15 thousand images. I have no idea how

many of them could be corrupted. I really don't want to be fiddling around with moving them or renaming

them or whatever just so lightroom can do it's job properly. This is a real pain in the arse and makes

lightroom useless for the function I am wanting to use it for right now - that is, image organisation. I should

also point out, that some of the files it lists as corrupted or problematic are fine. It seems to have a

problem with video files that play fine in VLC. It also chucks a wobbly over CRW files.

 

I was hoping that Lightroom was the solution to my disasterous image organisation. I'll probably have to

find some other software if I can't make it import the good files while ignoring the "bad" files. Surely there

must be a way? I can't believe they could design the import function so badly.

<p>So that's a no on the sync idea?</p>

<p>Are you trying to import all 10,000 at once? </p>

Sorry, I haven't tried sync. I'm not sure what that is. I'll have a look though.

 

I've imported a bunch of them via their folder structure on the hard drive, but there's still probably near

10,000 to import. I can't seem to break those down any further, as the "corrupt" images are spread in amongst them.

<p>What file types are the ones that are failing? Can you open one of them in any other software?</p>

Yeah. Some of the videos it says are failing open fine in VLC. The other common one it doesn't like are

CRW files which are raws from an old Canon S3 that I hacked with CHDK. I've processed them before in

something (can't remember what it was; possibly DPP or DCRAW). There are some actual corrupted jpgs

and the odd corrupted video.

 

edit: By the way, I just tried to sync the folders, and that didn't work either. It just stops again. It has given me the most comprehensive list of files yet, though. There's about 60. If that's all there are, I can try moving them to their own folder and ignoring that folder on import.

I got rid of the CRW files (it turns out I had made DNG copies of them way back), but it's failing to import

nearly every video now. And they all play fine. I'm not sure what its problem is. Incredible that they could

design the import function so poorly. I've got videos in a 100+ folders. There's no way I can fish them out,

even if I wanted to stuff up my collection like that.

<p>It's very easy to sort them out in the LR import dialog. Then they will all be grouped together and you just select the group and uncheck. Then LR won't try to import them. </p>

Oh, yeah I could do that. I'll try that tomorrow. Cheers.

It seemed to be the videos that was holding it up. Once I cut them en-masse out of the folders being

imported, it sped the whole thing up and it finished importing even though there were some raws and a

couple of jpgs that it couldn't import. It just doesn't seem to like videos. I can live with that. I'm more

concerned about organising my images.

 

My next step is to try a bit of a trick to use Picasa to tag faces in my collection, and then import those

tags as keywords for the correct images in Lightroom. I'm going to give this plugin a try -

http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/picasa-face-import