Hello lovely patrons… this is one for absolutely everyone to read and take note, because it has to do with file corruption… something we are all susceptible to. I’ve outlined my entire workflow many times here over the years, along with my review of preferred memory cards (Sony tough), but recent viral posts about how photographers manage memory cards & file backups sparked the inspiration for this post. In an indirect way, lightroom actually has built in detection for file corruption, which is something (to my knowledge) no other editing platform contains. The method of detection is simply rendering via Smart Previews.
There’s a lot more that goes into why I utilize smart previews, and again I suggest you review my many posts about lightroom optimization here on my patreon, but if nothing else I truly hope this illuminates the value of what taking time to render smart previews can do.
Additionally, I’ve attached a free app directly to this post, which read/writes every sector of a selected memory card to check for potential errors. Memory cards can wear overtime (especially if you also record video, or expose the cards to a lot of heat), but generally if you have a card that works reliably… it will work for a 100k cycles, which is a TON.
Still, whenever you buy a brand new card it’s best to use a tool like the attached called F3xSwift to check the entire card at least once before use. The attached file is the direct app itself that you can simply open and run immediately on macOS, it’s totally free.
Sometimes a card can appear to be working fine for a very long time before you’ve used enough capacity for a file to be written to a previously untapped sector of the card which, if you’re unlucky, contains an error and will corrupt whatever file is written to it. This app checks all those sectors ahead of time.
