Unable to Render JPG panorama files from Samsung S8 camera

[Neil MacAvoy]

I recently upgraded from a Samsung S6 to S8 Android phone. I've shot some panoramas, copied the files to my computer, and to my surprise PM is giving me a 'Unable to Render Image' error on only the JPG that were created using the panorama mode.

I'm not having problems with any of the other JPGs I've been shooting. Both Windows preview and Lightroom have no problem with these pano files. Has anybody else seen this problem or have ideas what might be causing it?

I'm running Windows 7, PM 5.0 build 18980

The phone is a Samsung S8, model SM-G950U, running Android 7.0.

Thanks

[Kirk Baker]

I recently upgraded from a Samsung S6 to S8 Android phone. I've shot some panoramas, copied the files to my computer, and to my surprise PM is giving me a 'Unable to Render Image' error on only the JPG that were created using the panorama mode.

I'm not having problems with any of the other JPGs I've been shooting. Both Windows preview and Lightroom have no problem with these pano files. Has anybody else seen this problem or have ideas what might be causing it?

I'm running Windows 7, PM 5.0 build 18980

The phone is a Samsung S8, model SM-G950U, running Android 7.0.

What is the pixel width and height of the image?

-Kirk

[Neil MacAvoy]

Hi Kirk,

It fails even with reasonable file sizes. I just shot this one at 5440x2192. I've discovered that if I read the image into Lightroom and then just write it back out in the same format (JPG), PM is having no trouble with the images. So there's something funky about the format or fields being used by the Samsung camera app, I'd guess.

I'm attaching an example failing file. I'll attach the post-Lightroom version of the same file to a follow-on reply since there's a limit.

-Neil

[Neil MacAvoy]

 As you can see from that previous post, there's something weird going on that is causing the images to appear inverted as well.

Now here's the output I'm getting from Lightroom for the same file, and PM is able to view this. Note that in this version, the image is in the correct orientation. I didn't do anything in Lightroom to make that happen..just read it in and wrote it out.

[Hayo Baan]

I looked at your files and I think I know the problem. The S8 manages to screw the metadata and has set it to have an image height and width of 0. I guess e.g. Lightroom doesn't even look at these values and analyses the jpg data directly. Other viewers, however, could refuse to render it because of this. I think you should complain to Samsung about their crappy files...

[Neil MacAvoy]

Thanks for that diagnosis. Sounds very plausible that's the issue. I was suspecting the screwup was on Samsung side, not PM.

Kirk - since the odds of me getting Samsung to issue a SW patch for this are slim, any chance you could add an option to ignore this metadata in future releases? Various other ways I have to view the file seem to be ignoring it. I understand if this seems like an out-of-warranty request, but never hurts to ask...

[Kirk Baker]

Neil,

The image is malformed if it has a zero size width and height.  PM errs on the side of caution when loading images.  If it looks corrupt, then we don't try to load it.  It is one of the things that makes PM reliable.

I'll discuss with the team, but I'm not sure we would make this change.

-Kirk