Photos in Camera Roll are just black

I just fixed the problem... It's all about the new multi-tasking feature. The files are synced correctly, however you need to close the running album app by double-clicking the home button, holding the app's icon a few seconds and then hitting the red X button. Then when you go into the photo album, the pictures show up correctly!

Hope this helps

This has been happening more and more frequently to me too. I don't sync my photos via iTunes, I import them directly into iPhoto. Recently photos have been 'blacking out' in pairs next to each other....

Having exact same problem on my iPhone 4 although the black boxes only appear after I started deleting photos from the phone. Now when I scroll through the library, random photos appear black and in the thumbnail view the ones I've deleted now show as black boxes.

Ouch. You're the first person I've heard of who couldn't get rid of the black boxes with a reboot. Seems I shouldn't have said "always works".

Well, I guess the next drastic measure is to move all the original images out of their folder to some Temp folder. Sync the iPhone again - which will delete the images in the cache. Then, copy them back to their original folder and sync again. Hope this works.

By the way, I am assuming that at one point, your images looked normal. Then, you did a rename or delete, and that's when you first saw the black boxes. Is that correct?

Message was edited by: LV_Bill

For me this is only happening for photos/videos taken with the iPhone, not photos synced from my Mac.

Tried your suggestion: No joy! I have a block of about 50 pics that are black in the camera roll. I can choose them and they display, just the thumbnail is black. Very frustrating. This happened in 4.0 and continues in 4.0.1!

Like everyone else I to seem to be having the same problem with my iPhone 3G since I updated the Software Version 4.0.1 on it so I think that Apple need to resolve this as I have tried all the ideas that I have read but with no success, still showing black thumbnails.

My pictures show when you tap on the blacked out area and you can scroll through photo's but with this I don't want to loose anything or do a restore just incase I loose anything, Apple would have to tell me it was alright to do this before I go ahead with it as it may come to that.

I feel that the more we report this in this way through Apple Discussions, will highlight the problem and Apple will have to respond by an update to respond to our problem.

Untick the Photo Sync option in iTunes and syync.
Then re-tick it and sync again. That should regenerate all the thumbnails

This problem only exits in camera roll when deleting pictures from the pc download program. However, it exists if I deleted pictures on the pc from other albums that I sync. It can be solved by sincing one more time, but this is a problem that Apple needs to fix in iOS4. It is a real pain to have to sync twice to get all the albums with the pictures you want. I have not had the problem if I delete pictures from the iphone.

OK, I JUST SOLVED THIS PROBLEM. I DID THE 4.1 UPDATE AND ALL MY PICS SHOWED UP AS BLACK SQUARES THAT WHEN TAPPED ON THEY APPEARED, BUT WHEN VIEWING THEM ALL AS A SET, THEY WERE BLACK. IF YOU ARE ON A MAC COMPUTER, GO TO THE "IMAGE CAPTURE" APPLICATION AND IMPORT ALL THE PHOTOS FROM YOUR PHONE ONTO YOUR COMPUTER INTO A FOLDER (WHICH I LABELED "iPhone Pics" AND THEN DELETE THEM ALL BY HAND FROM YOUR PHONE. THEN, GO UNDER THE IPHONE TAB IN ITUNES WHEN YOUR PHONE IS PLUGGED IN, AND GO TO PHOTOS, AND SYNC THAT FOLDER YOU JUST IMPORTED YOUR PICS TOO. THEN IT WORKS PERFECT, AND IT RESTORES IT TO WHAT IT SHOULD LOOK LIKE 🙂 HOPE THIS HELPS EVERYONE. AS FAR AS A PC GOES, JUST TRY AND GET YOUR PHOTOS ONTO YOUR COMPUTER ANYWAY YOU CAN, AND DELETE THEM AND RESYNC THAT FOLDER BACK ONTO THE PHONE.

OK, I JUST SOLVED THIS PROBLEM. I DID THE 4.1 UPDATE AND ALL MY PICS SHOWED UP AS BLACK SQUARES THAT WHEN TAPPED ON THEY APPEARED, BUT WHEN VIEWING THEM ALL AS A SET, THEY WERE BLACK. IF YOU ARE ON A MAC COMPUTER, GO TO THE "IMAGE CAPTURE" APPLICATION AND IMPORT ALL THE PHOTOS FROM YOUR PHONE ONTO YOUR COMPUTER INTO A FOLDER (WHICH I LABELED "iPhone Pics" AND THEN DELETE THEM ALL BY HAND FROM YOUR PHONE. THEN, GO UNDER THE IPHONE TAB IN ITUNES WHEN YOUR PHONE IS PLUGGED IN, AND GO TO PHOTOS, AND SYNC THAT FOLDER YOU JUST IMPORTED YOUR PICS TOO. THEN IT WORKS PERFECT, AND IT RESTORES IT TO WHAT IT SHOULD LOOK LIKE 🙂 HOPE THIS HELPS EVERYONE. AS FAR AS A PC GOES, JUST TRY AND GET YOUR PHOTOS ONTO YOUR COMPUTER ANYWAY YOU CAN, AND DELETE THEM AND RESYNC THAT FOLDER BACK ONTO THE PHONE.

I had all of my photos in my camera roll show up as a single black box after syncing and adding a photo album to my 3GS. I was able to correct this by clearing the iPod Photo Cache:
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1314

I had all of my photos in my camera roll show up as a single black box after syncing and adding a photo album to my 3GS. I was able to correct this by clearing the iPod Photo Cache:
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1314

Both of you have 3G's and apparently a unique version of the "black box" problem. I only have an IP4, so hopefully someone else with 3G expertise will jump in here with some better advice. Good luck

Same here. iPhone 3G iOS 4.0.1. I am quite sure that it did not happen with 4.0. Some photos and videos look like a black bar in thumbs preview but opening (viewing), e-mail and deleting works flawless. Maybe I'll try a sync with iPhoto later.