I got a Canon EOS Rebel XS/1000D over two years ago but never tried shooting in RAW format until this month, when my second daughter was born. The camera can shoot in either RAW or RAW+JPEG format, and I picked the latter, figuring the PC laptop I brought with me to the hospital would not be able to view pure RAW files.
As expected, the PC picked up the JPEG's just fine. When I later imported the data to my iMac, the JPEG's also appeared as normal but the accompanying RAW files appeared as black rectangles. I didn't worry too much about it, figuring, "Well, these are digital 'negatives' and they will only be converted to viewable images if I edit them in iPhoto."
Nearly a month later (today), I finally tried editing one of these RAW files and... nothing happened. Double-clicking the little black box did not magically convert the raw data into an image, it just opened up a big black box. WTF?
After some investigating, I realized these are not RAW files at all. The dead giveaway is that they are all the exact same size as their JPEG counterparts, meaning they contain no extra data. Something got messed up in the iPhoto import process, and all of the actual RAW data was lost!
Thinking that I had lost the precious image data files from one of the most important days in my life, I had a minor panic attack before realizing I had not yet erased the original SD card in my camera. Thanks for the coronary, Apple!
I spent hours searching Apple's site and found a page claiming Mac OS 10.5 supports my camera. Obviously, this is not entirely true.
But it is partly true. As an experiment, I shot a photo in RAW-only format, and it imported properly as a large (10MB) file with a viewable thumbnail instead of a black box. So iPhoto does support my camera's pure RAW files, just not the RAW+JPEG files.
After more hours of googling the rest of the interwebs, I came across two separate discussion threads confirming that this is the case. Sadly, the complaints I found date back to September 2008 -- well over two years ago -- yet Apple still has not fixed the problem. They've deployed multiple RAW compatibility software updates, one as recently as 4 days ago, but none have patched this major glitch.
I tried completely uninstalling and reinstalling the RAW compatibility drivers, but this didn't help.
So it looks like I am going to have to manually delete several hundred corrupted RAW files, import them using the Canon software (or my PC), then re-import the true RAW files into iPhoto. I'm looking forward to that about as much as my federal income tax filing.
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