photos in iMovie went black or became other pictures

For me firstly about few months ago only solution after trying many from web was changing duration of still images in iMovie.

Now it didn't work so I've tried again everything and many more and just at last almost trying another application I've noticed that images from other devices which are displayed OK are 2999px maximum but my pictures from iPhone which are not are 3200px. I've changed that for multiple images in Preview to 2800 and voila it works!

Try pictures with less than 3000px ;) I'm sure it will work then. I had to try about 10-20 tips from web from years 2010 till now. Only after that I've noticed that black pictures are from my iPhone only and with 3200px resolution. From other cameras it was 2800px maximum. Just off topic question, why iPhone takes pictures in 3200px and other better cameras under 3000px resolution? It's quite funny when iMovie is not supporting pictures from iPhone only.

This is exactly what needs to happen. The resolution needs to be changed on pictures that are black. I've done the same end of school year project for that last twelve years and never had a problem. Updated OS and iMovie and black stills everywhere despite using the same camera and trying every other fix mentioned - .png, screenshots, etc. Spent two days wondering how this graduation video would ever get done. Decided to try exporting again and this time changed the quality/resolution and thankfully everything is running smoothly. I did batch changes by exporting through Photos - JPEG - Quality(Medium) - Size(Full Size). You can also do it with single pictures by exporting through Preview and slide the Quality slider to the middle and export that way. All of my pictures are now working. Changing to .png and taking screenshots made it look like the pictures were working, but when I returned to the project the next day they were all black again. Hope this helps and thanks to kubajz896 for pointing me in the right direction. Makes me wonder how an update is unable to handle the same resolution previous versions could.

I'm having the exact same issue and found other threads about it. Most tell you to try and delete iMovie preferences but this didn't fix my problem. I even deleted iMovie, rebooted and re-downloaded iMovie from the App Store and still the same.

This happens with iPhoto pictures as well as pics I drag from Finder to iMovie.

MacBook Air 13.3 (mid-2011) I bought yesterday with Lion and all updates installed.

My first Mac... This isn't a good start 😟

Same issue here, sometimes closing and opening imovies worked. Also some photos that have been enhanced in iphoto had this issue, reverting the image back to original sometimes fixed it. But really disappointing.

I know that some fixes only work for some people but I have had multiple problems with pics and iMovie 11. My work around will probably only work for those who can add pics to one project but not another. If you have a corrupted project and can't add stills then start a new project with the same settings and add all the photos you want in your other project. Keep them atleast 1 second long and in the order you want them in your other project for your own convenience. Make any adjustments here and export the movie at max quality. Then import the published Picture movie as an event. You now have all your pics formatted safely as video. Next scroll through each pic/2 finger click/select: add still to project. Each still will add to the bottom of your corrupted project and will use far less memory/heap zone erors than ever before. Publish and enjoy!

Hope it works for you!

hey guys, there are some workarounds/fixes and helpful hints for this issue in this thread

Hey guys, I was trying to import my business logo into an i movie project as a transparency but was having major hassles getting it to fit within the 'crop' parameters. My friend who has photo shop altered the image for me to 1920 x 1080 which has the required aspect ratio of 16:9 as other posts have suggested and saved as a PNG to retain its transparency. Yet when I tried importing it from i photo, no matter what I did, the imported image via the 'picture in picture' function was just black. I tried a bunch of other images - some were ok and others were still just black. But then I tried not using i photo at all and just dragged the image directly from a usb via 'finder' and presto - she worked beautifully. It was the i movie / i photo connection that was screwing it all up. Give it a try and good luck.

Anyone ever come up with REAL fix for this problem?

I just upgraded to El Capitan and all my movies now have this problem. Even the ones I have made in the past. The problem happens when I pull photos in from Finder. And I can't even get the new "Photos" app to even show up in iMovie so I haven't tried that.

Thank you so much! This worked for me too!

How do you changes the image's px?

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=how+to+change+pixels+preview 😉

Not sure what is causing the issues, but the workaround that I was able to apply is creating an screenshot of the photo (command+shift+4) and then importing it to the project.

Sorry but that's not very clever solution. You'll lose lot of picture original quality. Try my tip, change resolution of not displayed pictures to less than 3000px.

😉 great for us all and maybe others are coming 😀

only one last thing: you wrote about changing resolution or quality in preview for single pictures only? you can do that to multiple pictures also..