A few months ago, I started noticing strange occurrences with my photos, both on my iPhone and my Mac. At first, I ignored it; I thought it might be my fault since I spend a lot of time in my photo library adding keywords to my pictures. However, when I examined it more closely, I realized it wasn’t my doing, and what was happening was peculiar and needed to be brought to Apple’s attention.
I have about 10,000 pictures in my library dating back many years. A large portion of those came from a point-and-shoot camera that I imported from a memory card; some were scanned, and the rest were captured over the years using various iPhones.
The problem I’m experiencing is that pictures from my library are duplicating themselves—sometimes once, twice, or even three times. Today, I noticed that the same video now appears 18 times in my library. When this happens, they show up at the bottom of the file as if I just took them. Additionally, the metadata changes from its original state to the date and time when the duplication occurred. New pictures that I take are never duplicated; it’s only old photos.
There’s no real rhyme or reason for when this happens. I’ve been working with an Apple specialist for a few weeks now, and she’s had me run various diagnostic tests that she forwards to her engineers. We’re no closer to figuring out what’s wrong and why it happens than we were when we started.
On one hand, it’s really interesting; on the other hand, I wish this had happened to someone else. I don’t particularly like being a test subject for glitches.
When/if we ever get this solved, I’ll post an update; however, I wanted to share this with the group.
