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The Apple Support Community will permanently close on November 20, 2026. Starting today, the site will no longer accept new posts and is available in a read-only state.
You can continue to find trusted guidance and support on the official Apple Support site.
We want to thank the community members who have contributed their time and expertise to help others with their Apple products.
Am running OS 26.6.2 on an M2 MacBook Air and iPhotos lives on iCloud - just recently a large selection of my photos now show as black boxes. I have tried the Command Option repair but nothing has changed - have I lost these photos or can I retrieve them?
MacBook Air (M2, 2023)
Nope, they should be on icloud. Go to https://www.icloud.com/ and you should see them there. To try and get rid of the black boxes, Toggle iCloud Sync: Go to System Settings > (Your Name) > iCloud > Photos, uncheck Sync this Mac, wait 30 seconds, and turn it back on. This forces the app to re sync without losing your library.
Have a good day!
Nope, they should be on icloud. Go to https://www.icloud.com/ and you should see them there. To try and get rid of the black boxes, Toggle iCloud Sync: Go to System Settings > (Your Name) > iCloud > Photos, uncheck Sync this Mac, wait 30 seconds, and turn it back on. This forces the app to re sync without losing your library.
Have a good day!
stuberry wrote: … I also realized that they are all Tiff's from images I scanned some years ago…
Can you export those Tiffs to Finder with File>Export>Export Unmodified Originals? I think that I would export the Tiffs and re-import them. Photos is confused by some old formats, but the originals should be OK. If you did edits and comments, you should be able to export those with File>Export>Export nn Photos.
Let us know how this goes…
I just upgraded to Mac O/S 27.2.1 and my Tiff images are now visible
stuberry wrote: …I arbitrarily chose a couple of the files and unfortunately they still appear black
You exported unmodified originals to a folder on Finder? How did you view them? Did you try opening them with Preview or some other software?
I arbitrarily chose a couple of the files and unfortunately they still appear black although I can read all of the info about the original image - I did these scans in 2002 and the files are fairly big
I really appreciate everyone's support
Thank you - however when I go to icloud https://www.icloud.com/ the blackbox images are not visible. They appear with a triangle with an exclamation mark in the middle of the triangle.
I also realized that they are all Tiff's from images I scanned some years ago - they always appeared in my albums but for recently
I used preview - I also tried renaming as a png as this was a suggestion I found online but nothing - do you have a different viewer suggestion?
Photos now black boxes in iPhoto library
