What is a corrupted photo?

[sunsetpainter]

Every once in a while when I am updating a listing on Ebay, I get this on one or more of the photos:

Invalid photo (CLERR002)

The file seems to be corrupted. Please remove it and upload valid JPG, GIF or PNG, TIF or BMP file.

I save all my photos to CD discs and when I reload it, it's fine.  What causes a photo/file to become corrupted?

[zoesam]

Who knows, it's Ebay. But I've sure been getting a lot of them lately. A corrupt file just means that the file has gotten bad data mixed in with the good data. In Ebay's case, it probably has something to do with the links to the photo being bad, as opposed to the file itself, but I'd have to know more about how Ebay's stores the data to know for sure.

I did some relisting last night & 4 out of 5 had notices that the gallery photo was corrupt. But when I went in, it was all the photos, so I had to delete them all & re-upload & then everything was fine.

Was this happening to you last night? I'm curious b/c it happened to me last night, but has been happening over the last few months to me, after years of it not happening. I thought the culprit was my listing software, that's why I'm curious when it was happening to you. Maybe it's been Ebay all along. They seem to go in spurts, when they have this problem, then it's ok for a long time, then it comes up again.

ETA:  I should clarify, it is not YOUR photo that is bad, but their copy of your photo or the link to it.  You prolly already figured that out, since re-uploading your photos, fixes it. 

[sunsetpainter]

Thanks zoesam.  I ended some listings this morning to tweak them a bit and re-list. I just noticed that one of the listing had 2 "bad" photos. I copy all my listing photos to some blank DVD's that I have left from when I was recording shows from the TV. That comes in handy when my pics go kaflooey on Ebay. I only notice it when I end a listing then relist/sell similar.

[zoesam]

I was having the same problem late last night & I also noticed it when I was relisting, though the items had been ended for a long time. It was after midnight, so may have had to do with the calendar changeover causing problems at Ebay. Though I had some a few weeks ago too.

I don't check my items when I re-list, so I actually found a handful a few weeks ago, when I was just looking at my Active items & noticed a few right in a row that had no gallery photo. They'd been listed for weeks. Ughh. It's just time consuming to fix. FWIW, it's gotta be Ebay b/c I was having the same problem last night, but I was listing using SB. They were relists, but Ebay doesn't know that since they were coming from SB.

You may just want to check all your listings, but I've been finding them over the last few months, always in small bunches.

[zoesam]

sunsetpainter it just happened to me again, at 3:30 in the afternoon on Friday, New Years.  I did about 5 & only 1 of them had the problem. 

[chapeaunoir]

I have that problem from time to time but not lately (but I haven't been listing much on eBay) - IMHO it's the upload and not the photo - when the photo is uploaded to the servers of wherever you're uploading it to, it can be bad sectors on those servers, or what they call a database 'event' when there are updates coinciding with the photo load. I just re-upload it, but it's never my own photos when I've checked. 

ETA: If it was a local problem (small media failure, i.e., scratch on your CD or whatever), you'd know it right away.

[sunsetpainter]

I'm not techie at all, but I kind of figured it wasn't a problem on my end because when I reloaded the photo it was fine. Just wondering what causes that. Thanks for the info. Trying to learn/understand computer stuff.

[zoesam]

Jan 2, 2021 5:13:59 GMT sunsetpainter said:

I'm not techie at all, but I kind of figured it wasn't a problem on my end because when I reloaded the photo it was fine. Just wondering what causes that. Thanks for the info. Trying to learn/understand computer stuff.

Without going into way more detail than you'd want lol, there are many ways it can happen, it's just an accidental overwriting of good data, with bad data.  It does not necessarily affect an entire record or entry.  If one small portion is wrong or unexpected by the program reading the data, the program will not know what to do with the bad sections, b/c it was expecting something else in there.  In old terms, it's an abend (abnormal end) to a process of which there are many different kinds. 

Think of a typical address, I might write a program to parse the address & split it into different fields for name, street number, street name, city, state, zip.  In my program I would tell it to expect alpha data in certain places, numerical data in certain places & a mixture in other spaces.  If somehow by accident the zip code field contains alpha characters instead of numeric, you have corrupt data :-)  That's just 1 easy to understand example.  There are countless ways that it can happen, mostly they fall into 2 categories - bad data & bad programming. 

[sunsetpainter]

Thanks zoesam   That actually makes sense to me.