Pictures are black in PDF of iMessage

Hi Samsterdam2,

Thanks for coming to Apple Support Communities for help today. It sounds like you are making PDFs of iMessage conversations but images are blacked out on your Mac.

Are you going through File > Print > PDF > Save As PDF? Are any Security Options enabled?

Does this happen with every Message you attempt to save as a PDF?

What happens if you sign into Messages inside a new user account? Does the same thing occur? Here's how to make a new user: Set up users, guests, and groups on Mac.

Let us know further details.

Have a fantastic day!

I just contacted Apple Support regarding this issue. I told the representative that it appears (from someone else's post on this thread), that Apple changed their privacy policy in iMessage that has resulted in this problem. I explained that there are many people who want (or need) the ability to print or save PDF copies of conversations with photos not blacked out. The representative had me make a "concise statement of complaint" that he typed up to submit.

BUT -- he informed me that the chances of this being changed, because the change was due to privacy concerns and issues, is very, very low. I explained how printing a conversation with these big black boxes was a real problem (lots of ink, paper), and how I felt that a person - if they've sent me a photo - has given me permission to print it. He suggested a "screen shot" of photos, but obviously that does not resolve the problem.

I suggest we all continue to contact support or provide feedback to Apple regarding this, and see if it can't be changed.

https://www.apple.com/feedback/

Never had to use this feature until my best friend passed away. I'm trying to save our entire chat history over the years. Wish I didn't upgrade to Big Sir.

What's frustrating is that you can see a few pixels of the image, however, the rest is covered in black. So obviously, there's some sort of bug here. Even happens on much smaller conversation threads. Emojis and link image previews appear just fine.

Help us Apple!

Brilliant. You can remove the black boxes by just printing to PDF then opening it and deleting the black boxes. You can drag the images and videos individually out of messages to finder. And you can select images in the info tab and adding them to photos.

Not only is their attempt at privacy utterly useless, all they've done is waste people's time who need to need to save messages for legitimate work and legal reasons.

I am having the same problem, but it appears as though there is a black box over the photo. I uploaded the PDF to Adobe, selected Edit PDF and this allows me to remove the various sections of the black box and reveal the photo. Not a long term fix, but I hope this helps.

I am having the same issue and was wondering if you solved the problem, thank you

thank you

To summarize what is really happening.

Apple, to protect ones privacy, decided to black out the images when you print or export to PDF. If you export to PDF and open the PDF with a more sophisticated editor such as Adobe Photoshop / Illustrator, Affinity Photo / Designer you will see there are layers for the images. All Apple did was put a black box layer over the top of each of the images. You can remove this black box using the more sophisticated software. Any software that can edit PDF's and display the layers should work. Fortunately, Apple decided against merging the layers or using actual redaction methods to scrub the image beneath.

All I have to do is uncheck that middle Group black box and the image below appears then save the PDF.

Obviously, that can be tedious but with professional tools you may be able to automate it a bit. Other tooling that might work would be to extract the Messages from an iPhone and there's at least 2-3 of those tools for macOS where you connect the iPhone to the Mac and use that software to extract the Messages including the attachments and you won't have the blackout occurring. This appears to be the easiest of all the methods.

Another option is to open the Messages App on the iPhone tap on the Info for the Contact at the top and select the photos you wish to save and put them into Photos. That will save your photos outside of Messages in the Photos camera roll. They will not be blacked out. I wish Apple made it easier to select many at once instead of tapping every single image one at a time. I think you can tap and drag in Photos but not in the Messages photo selection screen. At least I can't find a way to quickly select many of the Messages photos.

I have the same problem. I am required to save my work conversations every two weeks. Something happened between 4/15/2021 and 4/29/2021. My PDF export on 4/15/2021 has all the images from the Messages conversation. My next PDF export on 4/29/2021, however, has black boxes where the images should be.

I'm pretty sure I didn't change anything to cause the problem. Was there a MacOS update between 4/15 and 4/29?

There was a macOS Big Sur 11.3 update on 4/26, but the release notes don't mention anything about messages. I know that I don't remember changing anything on my Mac.

Maybe somebody can test this in Messages on their Mac if they have a conversation that include images (photos, documents, etc). Select the conversation and then File > Print > Save as PDF, and see if all the images show up in the exported conversation.

Confirmed, I have duplicated the problem on a brand new M1 Mac mini with Big Sur 11.4 and latest patches. Super clean macOS installation. This appears to be a bug.

Everyone should submit feedback on this bug to get Apple's attention so they can fix it. There is something wrong with the rendering of images within iMessage printing (PDF or otherwise).

https://feedbackassistant.apple.com

There are alternative Apps from 3rd Parties to access your iPhone data including Messages. PhoneView, CopyTrans, and iExplorer are perhaps the top 3. These tools allow you to access your raw data and back it up or otherwise extract it more effectively than Apple normally allows.