Photos appearing as blank

Question

Level 1

8 points

Photos appearing as blank

Can anyone explain why some of my photos are appearing like this in Finder? The preview image is still there, but the icon is blank (see screenshots). I can't double click to open, but if I right click it defaults to open with preview, and the images open as full images. I tried exporting the images from Preview back to a different folder as JPGs and although they then appeared ok in Finder (including the icon), they also wouldn't open without right click, and when I tried to upload to Flickr, Flickr couldn't recognize them.

Any hints?

MacBook, macOS 10.13

Posted on May 9, 2020 6:45 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

cp from OH

Community Specialist

May 10, 2020 11:50 AM in response to harriettekd

Hello harriettekd and welcome to Apple Support Communities.

I see you are having issues with getting some .jpg files to open and display properly.

It looks like the files that were exported from Preview may be lacking a file extension. That would explain why you need to right-click and use Open With and why a site such as Flickr might not recognize them as a legitimate image file.

Try renaming the files and add .jpg to the end of the name.

Cheers.

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Answer 2

Leanne_68

Community Specialist

May 11, 2020 9:54 AM in response to harriettekd

Hi harriettekd.

While I can't tell you exactly what happened or why, this type of behavior (basically that the files are being treated as though they do not have an extension and, therefore, an app for opening them can't be determined) is a strong indication of data corruption. The best advice I can offer right now will be to make sure you have a good and current backup and then run the First Aid process on the drive.

Repair a storage device in Disk Utility on Mac - Apple Support

If the photos are housed on the internal drive, you'll want to boot into macOS Recovery first.

About macOS Recovery - Apple Support

Cheers.

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Answer 3

harriettekd Author

Level 1

8 points

May 10, 2020 1:02 PM in response to cp from OH

Hi

Thanks for the response. You're right about the one exported from preview, so that's my bad.

However, the other 6 in the screenshot were that way before I tried the export process - they DID have file extensions, were imported from my phone camera, and were working fine a few weeks ago, then suddenly weren't.

My first thought, actually, was that they had bad extensions so I tried initially just to rename them with adding jpg but I wasn't even able to rename them - right clicking didn't bring up that option, and I wasn't able to click into the name to change it.

If you have any other ideas that would be super helpful!

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