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Corrupt Photos

After having recently enabled iCloud Photo Library on my Mac, I was scrolling back through the photos and noticed that several of them seem to have been corrupted at some point. The thumbnails show with various amounts of black area covering part of the photo:

User uploaded file

And the photo itself displays in a peculiar manner:

User uploaded file

All the corrupt photos display in a similar manner: top part of photo, little thumbnail on gray horizontal line, then more top part of photo. Portrait photos are the same except: right part of photo, little thumbnail on vertical gray line, then more right part of photo.


All photos are from a ~2 month span of time about a year back, and not all photos in that span are messed up (but most are). I confirmed with my iPhone (also connected to iCloud Photo Library with the Optimize option on) that this oddity is not just local to my Mac. I know that these photos once used to display normally, and I'm unsure what could've triggered the change. I'm hoping there's some way to fix these photos, and I'm also concerned that this may happen again to more of my photos. Anyone have any insight as to a possible cause or solution?

iMac, OS X El Capitan (10.11.3), 27-inch, Mid 2011

Posted on Feb 13, 2016 7:59 PM

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Posted on Feb 13, 2016 11:29 PM

It looks like a JPEG corruption, perhaps a transmission error from or to iCloud or bad blocks on your disk.


Do the copies of your photos in iCloud display correctly? Open the Photos.app on your iCloud webpage www.icloud.com and check the photos in question. Download a few of them to your mac.


Restore your Photos library from Time Machine to an external drive (go back in time to a date before you uploaded the photos to iCloud) and compare to the photos you uploaded to iCloud.

2 replies
Question marked as Best reply

Feb 13, 2016 11:29 PM in response to Kyrin

It looks like a JPEG corruption, perhaps a transmission error from or to iCloud or bad blocks on your disk.


Do the copies of your photos in iCloud display correctly? Open the Photos.app on your iCloud webpage www.icloud.com and check the photos in question. Download a few of them to your mac.


Restore your Photos library from Time Machine to an external drive (go back in time to a date before you uploaded the photos to iCloud) and compare to the photos you uploaded to iCloud.

Corrupt Photos

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