Why do I not receive pictures in Messages?

It works. Many Thanks.

Hey, I tried to find those files under preferences and they're not there at all... I'm slightly confused - shouldn't they be there if the program is running? o.O

I am having the same problem - no pictures downloading. I went to preferences and I could not find those either - just not there. I did a restart, just to be sure, and still nothing there. Messages come through fine, but, no pictures.

same problem here (again - even after the osx update)

Messages Version 7.0 (3103)

None of the above solved my problem directly (though in the end some, or all, of the suggestions may have contributed).

I found that deleting my iMessage accounts from iMessage, then recreating them, (and/or just disabling, restarting iMessage, Enabling iMessage account) and allowing iMessage to connect to all and sundry (basically carte blance network access :-/ ) did finally enable iMessage to send and receive images and messages. I also got an alert on my iPwn saying "WARNING! Someone on an iMac just enabled access to your Messages!" or something like that. Good to see that Apple thought to alert us. :-)

Try disabling, restarting, enabling, your account first:

i.e.: iMessage/Accounts select your iMessage account

untick Enable this account

quit iMessage

Open iMessage

Preferences / Accounts

tick Enable this account

(at this point you may get alerts from firewalls, either Allow iMessage to PWN my networks, or figure out what connections are required and update us here. ;-)

Otherwise, delete and recreate your iMessage account:

i.e.: iMessage / Preferences / Accounts

select account and click -

delete

Then click + and add your iMessage account back.

I'm running 10.8.2 and just had the problem, could send/receive text no problem, just no pics, they would only go to the iphone. So I checked Messages preferences and it had me as not signed in, tried to sign in, that crashed Messages. Finally got signed in, still no images. So, signed out of Messages, closed it, restarted, started Messages, went through the little sign-up thing (basically logged in and selected phone numbers/email addresses to be used with iMessage), still a problem, it said I wasn't signed in, checked prefs, I was signed in, but had to reenable there, now it seems to be working again.

How buggy is that?

I never signed out, so I don't understand why it didn't have me as signed in and why I could send/receive text but no images.

-David

I can add one little bit to that.

When sending or receiving pic the iMessages side use a support process called URLFileTransfer.

It very briefly appears in the Activity Monitor List when Transfers are working (Almost too fast to see).

When Transfers are not working the item can be seen in the Activity Monitor.

The File Transfer Window (See the Window Menu) also gets stuck at "Waiting".

A PRAM reset seems to help.

10:05 PM Thursday; January 24, 2013

Please, if posting Logs, do not post any Log info after the line "Binary Images for iChat"

 iMac 2.5Ghz 5i 2011 (Mountain Lion 10.8.2)
 G4/1GhzDual MDD (Leopard 10.5.8)
 MacBookPro 2Gb (Snow Leopard 10.6.8)
 Mac OS X (10.6.8),
 Couple of iPhones and an iPad
"Limit the Logs to the Bits above Binary Images."  No, Seriously

Hi Ralph,

At one point I did see a bunch of stuck file transfers and should have analyzed and resolved the problem then, but I did not have to do a pram reset to resolve my issue.

Personally, I would only resort to modifying system files and doing pram resets and things like that if I couldn't resolve the problem other ways. For some reason, I was able to resolve it by signing out of iMessage in Messages prefs/accounts, killing off Messages, restarting, then signing back in. I suppose if that didn't work, I would have tried the solutions that you and some other people posted about.

When I was searching for the problem, I did see your other thread on this issue, so thanks for that.

Thanks,

-David

No problem.

I guessed you had looked around the issue somewhat.

As I said I was posting the one bit of info that has popped out of looking around so far.

Glad you had found a solution

6:50 PM Friday; January 25, 2013

Please, if posting Logs, do not post any Log info after the line "Binary Images for iChat"

 iMac 2.5Ghz 5i 2011 (Mountain Lion 10.8.2)
 G4/1GhzDual MDD (Leopard 10.5.8)
 MacBookPro 2Gb (Snow Leopard 10.6.8)
 Mac OS X (10.6.8),
 Couple of iPhones and an iPad
"Limit the Logs to the Bits above Binary Images."  No, Seriously