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Photo booth videos are saving as corrupted/blank files.

If I record a video on my mac photo booth that surpasses 3 or 4 minutes it saves as an empty video. 0:00 seconds and I'm unable to play it. This began happening after I updated to MacOS Monterey. I have put my computer into safe mode, changed, users, restarted, deleted photobooth library and made a new one etc. Any help would be great. I've attached a photo as an example.

MacBook Air 13″, macOS 11.0

Posted on Dec 3, 2021 11:14 AM

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Posted on Feb 8, 2022 4:29 PM

Hi! Has anyone found a solution yet? This happened to me today when I recorded something on my PhotoBooth on my new 2021 Macbook Pro (running on Monterey OS). Really urgent for me to recover this .MOV file as right now it's not even playing and any free website converter I upload it to, it just says "error". Please help Apple!


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Question marked as Best reply

Feb 8, 2022 4:29 PM in response to Jordie1994

Hi! Has anyone found a solution yet? This happened to me today when I recorded something on my PhotoBooth on my new 2021 Macbook Pro (running on Monterey OS). Really urgent for me to recover this .MOV file as right now it's not even playing and any free website converter I upload it to, it just says "error". Please help Apple!


Mar 30, 2022 2:38 PM in response to Itsbritttt

Omg…..same issue! Apple Support, this is a huge issue for your customers. I recorded using my photo booth video feature because I needed to reference the footage at a later date. The 2+ hrs of info on my video is critical to my success. It’s extremely disappointing that over a year later customers are still experiencing this issue with no resolve, support, or response from your team. You all should have at least disabled the video feature or sent an error message so we wouldn’t be misled that it actually works & we could have located a service that actually works. Now what are we suppose to do? When do you all plan to fix this issue? The lack of follow us is unsatisfactory. Please follow up ASAP.

Jan 28, 2022 10:21 PM in response to Itsbritttt

Which repair mov service did you use?? I'm having the same issue :( All the repair services seem so sketchy suggesting VLC first and then offering their services as a "last resort". Definitely doesn't make me trust that any of them actually work. But I really need to recover the video I made. It's 47 minutes long, but showing up as 0:00 in PhotoBooth, Finder, and VLC. Any advice would be so appreciated!

Apr 4, 2022 10:56 AM in response to mobilemobster

I am on Monterey 12.3.1, MBP 16 inch 2021 M1 Max.

I recorded a 45 minute funeral talk today and the file is showing the same symptoms, 0 length, will not open, obviously this is devastating as we were going to share the video with friends and family who could not attend.

Tried video repair tools and they only can recover 25 minutes of unsynced video. I fear we may have lost it forever now because of this awful bug.

Dec 7, 2021 5:00 AM in response to Old Toad

@OldToad

They are being saved in the Photo Booth Library Pictures folder just like you said. I have always gone there to browse my photobooth videos. Now when I go there they show up as .mov files with no thumbnail and when I open them they display an error message saying "not compatible with QuickTime" or something to that effect.


I used a "repair .mov file" service online and that seemed to do the trick but having to do that for each and every video I make isn't a solution. Also, a lot of these services have a cap on the size of the video you can upload and most of my videos are fairly long.


I will try the VLC app and see what happens. If that doesn't do the trick I'll look into the anti-virus apps.


Thanks for all of your help! I'll let you know if I have any luck.

Aug 30, 2022 4:10 PM in response to Itsbritttt

So frustrating. Not only I can't record simple photo booth videos on an expensive MPB M1 Max, but also I lost the chance to have some important stuff recorded, because the app was behaving normally while supposedly recording. Come on, Apple, it's been months since this was first reported, I can't believe it still is a thing. Here it seems to record only short videos. I used Wondershare Video Repair but it didn't quite work as the "repaired" version is totally messed up.



Dec 6, 2021 5:03 AM in response to Old Toad

Hi @Old Toad


I have already put my mac in Safe Mode multiple times and haven't had much success. Although, whenever I go into safe mode I can't even use photobooth at all! When I open the application it says "No camera detected." When I go out of safe mode and back to regular mode the camera works but the videos don't save.


Thanks for your response. Let me know if you have any other suggestions :)



Apr 13, 2022 3:22 AM in response to Itsbritttt

I had this very same issue after upgrading to Monterey. Those recordings were related to my new project which after saving them turned out to be of 00:00 time in an unplayable format of MOV.


I then repaired the videos using a video repair tool that cost me some extra bucks but in the end, I was able to repair them and used them significantly in a playable format.


@Apple you need to resolve this bug from Photobooth running on OS Monterey!

May 18, 2022 10:15 AM in response to Itsbritttt

I am experiencing the same problem. I'm making an educated guess that the security features with screen lock are causing a write error. I have tried disabling the screen lock feature and it seems to work, but wanted to toss this hypothesis out there to see if anyone else who's having this issue can replicate this pattern.


Obviously the only way to fix this is to wait for a new patch because i don't want to have to disable this every time and I certainly don't want to leave my system unprotected. Hopefully this gives some of the developers some place to look.

Photo booth videos are saving as corrupted/blank files.

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