I’m sharing this fix with the world, so that others need not live my pain.
Last night, I returned from Lake Tahoe with 451 beautiful shots of our family snow trip, all taken with my Canon 40D SLR. Each shot was captured in both large format JPG and RAW format.
Unfortunately, after loading all my images into iPhoto ’09, I ran into a real problem:
When I double-clicked any of the JPG files to edit/view them, they displayed a purely black screen. It was strange because the thumbnails were fine, the RAW files were fine, and when I opened the JPG files in Photoshop CS3, they were fine.
There was no way around it. Relaunching iPhoto did not help. Rebuilding the library did not help. Rebuilding thumbnails did not help. Reloading the images from the compact flash card did not help.
I shuddered to think about the wisdom of upgrading to iPhoto ’09. After all, at least iPhoto ’08 could display JPG files. My only hope: the Canon 40D is a popular camera, and has been out for a while. This must be a solved issue.
My searches on Google turned up a few articles and discussions, but nothing convincing. Some threads on the Apple Discussion forums. A post or two on other Mac sites.
Fortunately, I found the answer. But let me first tell you what it wasn’t:
- It wasn’t the PowerPC (I have an Intel-based Mac Pro)
- It wasn’t file size
- It wasn’t iPhoto ’09
- It wasn’t the Canon 40D
Unfortunately, several sites fingered these things as culprits. All wild goose chases.
Here is what it was:
- A corrupted install of Mac OS X 10.5.6
Hard to believe, but the auto-update I had done just before leaving for vacation was the culprit. Thanks to one tip, I downloaded the full combo installer for the Mac OS X 10.5.6 Upgrade from Apple.
A full re-install of the update, a reboot, and all was well.
I hope this tip finds someone out there in good stead. Seeing your precious photos reduced to a black screen is frightening to the core, even if you know the photo files themselves are not corrupted.
Thanks for your post. I also own a 40D and just purchased an iMac. I updated the system as soon as I got it home and have not even loaded any photos yet but am glad to have read your post.
Cheers.
Hi,
I tried your solution but it didn’t work for me… I’m wondering if you re-installed a fresh 10.5 before applying the update?
I have found I can “work around” it by opening my scans in Photoshop and saving with “Progressive” encoding (seems to work reliably so far!); saving from Photoshop with “Baseline” encoding exhibits the problem as well.
It seems to me to be an iPhoto issue as the “problem” JPEGs display fine in Safari, Preview, Photoshop, … and even in full screen Slideshows in iPhoto!!!
I am really looking forward to a fix for this!
Thanks!
The black screen in Edit Mode affected a number of my photos. This worked:
1. Drag thumbnail to desktop to get duplicate
2. Delete thumbnail in iPhoto.
3. Drag copy back into iPhoto – restored normal function.
Note: If this image had already been edited, I would search in the iPhoto files for the original.
Unfortunately, I have tried changing to Progressive and also dragging to desktop but nothing works for me!
Anyone else with any suggestions? It’s oh so frustrating.
I was working in Photoshop Elements 4 and it was working the day before but the next day it started to display this black image.
Any other suggestions from anyone?
Cheers
Carol
Macbook Pro core2 Duo
10.6.2
The same problem also with movie. I still did not manage to localize & fix it.
Apple does not give any answers.
iMac 24″ with iPhoto’09 8.1.1 (419) running on OS 10.6.2
same to us: since we bought the new Nikon D5000 we also got pure black images in edit mode; we are using a shared iPhoto library instead: when user 1 imports JPEGs from Nikon user 2 is not able to edit them (black) – and same verse visa… the older Casio Exilim never got this problem with iPhoto…
did someone fix this problem meanwhile?
Thanks for feedback
Same problem here for one user of a shared library. The main user can display the photos fine, and the other user can see the thumbnails fine, but opening some of the pictures gives a black image. Interestingly, adjusting the window size shows a preview of the picture, but it goes blacks when you stop resizing the window.
The problem seems to be the permissions on the files within the Originals folder of the iPhoto library. To correct this issue, I closed iPhoto from both accounts, then used a terminal window to cd into the newest folder within the Originals folders and list the file permissions. For me this is :
cd /Shared_iphoto_library/iPhoto Library/Originals/2010/16 Apr 2010
I then granted rw to the group (staff) for all newly imported photos using chmod g+rw *
This seems to sort the issue, but will be a real pain if I need to do this after every new import. I’ll see if I can see the permissions on the folder to cascade upon creation of new files.
I have just taken delivery of an iMac and iPhoto is doing some weird stuff, I can import my entire photo library from a PC but the thumbnails are blank if sized to anything over a quarter of the slide bar in the bottom corner. So, if the size is small you can see the thumbnails but if you increase the size they go blank, then, all the Events thumbnails are blank, regardless of size and iPhoto crashes every few minutes, but only if the photos are in the library.
If I create another user the other account gets none of these problems, so it only happens in the Admin account.
Help…..
For me, the issue was b&w mode for my pictures. I had to open them with photoshop, mode/rgb color and reimport them in iPhoto to save the issue. I have iPhoto 08 and Snow Leopard.
To correct this issue, I closed iPhoto from both accounts, then used a terminal window to cd into the newest folder within the Originals folders and list the file permissions.