Grey thumbnails when trying to import photos from iPhone to Photos

Question

Level 1

9 points

Grey thumbnails when trying to import photos from iPhone to Photos

I have upgraded to Catalina recently & now I seem to need to re-import 10,000 + photos from my iPhone. When I connect to my iMac the thumbnails in Photo app turn grey before all the photos are shown. The library on the mac shows everything fine. It's only the proposed import photos that are greyed out. I can't compare what is on my phone and what has already been imported. I am sure that most of my iPhone photos are already in my stem library !

Posted on Nov 2, 2020 6:29 AM

Reply

Answer 1

MoonJ.

Community Specialist

Nov 6, 2020 5:04 AM in response to Pete3rdfloor

Hello Pete3rdfloor,

We understand your seeing gray thumbnails as your photos, and we'd like to help.

We have a few questions to help us gain more information on this issue.

Are you only seeing this issue on one device? If so, have you tried restarting the device?
Is this issue happening with all photos?
Are the photos that appear with a gray thumbnail taken with the same device? If so, do you still have original copies of the photos?
If you open one of the thumbnails, tap on edit and perform one of the options such as rotating an image, does the issue continue?

We look forward to hearing from you.

Have a good one.

Reply

Answer 2

Pete3rdfloor Author

Level 1

9 points

Nov 6, 2020 8:16 AM in response to MoonJ.

1) The problem happens when I connect my iPhone 7+ IOS14.1 to my iMac OS Catalina. I have restarted them many times, I have even reinstalled Catalina.

2) Photos works OK on the iMac & ok on the iPhone but not when connected - the iMac starts to prepare photos for import, after a certain number ( +/- 6'000) the thumbnails cease to show up as photos & mostly all become grey.

3) I don't know why photos on the iMac wants to import 10'000+ photos from my iPhone as 99% of them were already imported before I updated to Catalina ! The originals are now mostly duplicated on my iMac & on my iPhone.

4) I cannot open a thumbnail to edit it. I select my iPhone from the sidebar and the only action I can do is click on a greyed out thumbnail to select the (non-visible) photo for importation, which causes a blue tick to appear on the greyed out thumbnail.

5) I spoke to various apple helplines online & the last person I spoke with said it was a recent bug, the engineers were working on it & there would one day be an update ( iPhone or Mac I'm not sure which) that would fix it.

That's the full story, over to you ...

Reply