Q: I am getting this message. It takes me to a page that definitely does not have any missing photos.

Thanks for the suggestion, good idea!

I have selected all of the pages and changed the background to black, then to white just to make sure that all the backgrounds are not images, but this hasn't worked unfortunately.

I have a feeling it must be something to do with the background, though, as that was when all the above strange behaviour began - it started after I tried to use an image as the background on a single page and could not preview it whilst in page view but on going back to the overview it was visible in the background.

I'll post this in the correct forum somewhere and see if anyone has any other useful advice.

Again, thanks for your time.

Larry, let me give you some free advice in exchange: perhaps think about the way you deliver your advice.

The pop up has already told me that the software thinks there are images missing. Obviously I can't see them or I wouldn't have posted this question. It was hardly a single line whinge, it was a detailed issue containing a number of strange behaviours, none of which you've addressed other than to reiterate the contention of the pop up box.

Your third statement was much more helpful. I'll go post my clearly annoying question elsewhere, in the hope of receiving useful advice like that given by Old Toad, or even a recognition that perhaps a piece of Apple software could possibly have a bug, rather than more dismissive comments like yours.

I don't have any missing photos. I have checked every frame and every page individually. No page has a photo background, they are all set to plain white. There are no grey areas on any page and no empty photo frames.

Exciting and interesting - I found the erratic page. I see from trawling the message boards that the two of you, Old Toad and LN, have had many many people posting very similar things. I am sure that a lot of the time it is people not realising they've selected for the page background to be an image without realising it, and they are taking out their frustrations on here.

However - this instance for me was different, and I'm not certain but I'd be willing to wager there are other who might've had similar issues and for whom this fix I found might work.

These are the steps:

1. Clear your available photos drawer to make it easier to see what is happening.
2. Go to the project overview and click "Buy" - the error message will pop up, and when you dismiss it, Photos should zoom you in to the page view for the page that is the issue. Two pages appear in the view, and you might not know which it is, so this fix addresses both pages:
3. Insert two brand new pages at that spot.
4. Configure those two pages to match the two that were zoomed in to after you dismissed the error message, i.e. select the layout and background colour that you want for those two pages.
5. Go back to the erroneous two pages, and one by one, select each of the photos that is in the erroneous pages and hit "delete" - the photos should reappear below in your available photos drawer.
6. At this point, I could see one extra photo in the available photos drawer than I had been able to see on my two erroneous pages.
7. Drag the photos you wanted into your new two pages and zoom them/adjust them to your preferences.
8. Delete the two, now empty, erroneous pages.
9. The "buy" button should now work. If not and there is another error message, there could be other pages you need to repeat this process for.

Hope this helps someone else!

At the end of this process I had a spare photo left in my available photos drawer that I could not see on the erroneous pages at all. I'm not sure what had happened or why but I suspect things got a little buggy with the placeholders.

This would be in keeping with the other weird behaviours I noticed Photos doing, which all began when on a single page I tried to set the background as an image, and then at one point whilst I was adjusting its transparency it just disappeared from view and I couldn't preview it in the page view. I could see it at the project overview level, though, and so had to keep making an adjustment at page level and then zooming out to project level to see what I'd done. (I looked for help at that point - see Re: Photo book project - I can set a photo as the page background but can't see it to make edits)

Eventually I figured I didn't like the look of having the semi-transparent black/white photo as background anyway, and so reverted those pages to just white backgrounds.

Not sure what happened but I think at some point placeholders got confused and thought they were still in the project, homeless, when they weren't or something. Changing all the backgrounds to a single colour and then back to white en mass didn't work, the only fix that worked was deleting all the photos from the erroneous zoomed-to page and replacing the page entirely, as described above.

Lastly, another bug that I noticed whilst doing this was that I had two pages: let's call them X and Y. I dragged them to swap their position, to make it Y, X instead of X, Y in the book page order. I then started working in more detail on page Y. Picture A and picture B were on page Y and I wanted to swap their position, so I clicked picture A and dragged it on top of B. B moved to the former position of A, as expected. Picture A however disappeared entirely and was replaced with a duplicate Picture C, which was in the corresponding position on page X. I deleted this new strange C and it moved to the photo drawer, a new duplicate of C, the original C still on page X where I'd left it. I deleted the new C from the drawer because it was freaking me out...

I wanted picture A back, which had disappeared. I went back to my album and found the original. Clicked it and dragged it to the project. It would not appear in the drawer. The only way I could get picture A back was to duplicate the original image in the album, then drag the new duplicate of A to the project. I was then able to see the new duplicated A in the drawer and drag it into page Y where I'd wanted it to be.

Messy! And as I said - looks to me like it's to do with placeholders thinking they are one photo when they are actually another.

Anyway I'm not sure if any of this will help anyone but I hope it does - particularly the stuff about "missing photos" because I feel like this might be something that is occurring sometimes in addition to cases where people haven't been aware they had the background set to being a photo on a page etc.

Kind regards,

Sarah