old .pict files show only black and white

Question

old .pict files show only black and white

I've got 15,000+ .pict photos (likely many duplicates) that Preview will open, but only show a white page, not the photo. Or there will be a black square in the upper left corner. A few of them have a photo-like icon, and they open to solid blue. They range in size from 168 KB to 4.5 MB, with the majority 1MB or larger.

I suspect they got messed up during an OSX upgrade, or when I was changing my backup hard drive, or in some other file-transferring scenario, but I'm only guessing.

I've tried using FileJuicer and GraphicConverter but they don't do any better than Preview.

Happy to supply samples if some legacy graphics wizard can help me out.

MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 10.15

Posted on May 29, 2021 9:30 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

léonie

Level 10

197,089 points

May 30, 2021 5:48 AM in response to Aunt Meg in Tucson

macOS Catalina does-no longer support some older legacy media formats. Older media items should have been converted to current formats before the upgrade to Catalina or Big Sur. If you have access to a Mac with MacOS 14, use this to convert the images to a compatible format. The inage formats listed here are safe to use: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209029

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Answer 2

May 30, 2021 12:05 AM in response to Aunt Meg in Tucson

Can you put a zipped (so the metadata should be preserved) sample file in Dropbox or some similar site.

"The PICT format just plain sucks. It is one of the worst-designed image formats in existence, second only to FlashPix. I don't believe that it was originally designed as a file format. Instead it appears to have emerged from the internal Apple QuickDraw structures. The files are not designed to be processed by any software other than the Mac OS. Intimate knowledge of the QuickDraw structures is required just to parse the PICT image, even if the reader doesn't care about the contained information. Because of this, PICT images are very fragile and a simple data error or programming bug will invalidate an entire image. Possibly for these reasons the PICT format never gained popularity outside the Apple world. Also, the concept of meta information is all but ignored in the PICT design."

https://exiftool.org/commentary.html#PICT

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