Wrong photo opens

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Level 4

2,777 points

Wrong photo opens

Just took six pictures of a storm-damaged Ash tree in my yard, using my iPad Pro. Photo Stream transferred them to my Mac Mini (High Sierra, Photos 3.0).

So far, so good.

When I click on any of the six new pictures, Photos instead opens pictures from Venice, Italy that I took with my iPhone five months ago. I have option-command clicked Photos when opening to repair its library. The same issue continues, however.

Selecting photos at random in my library yields the results one expects -- clicking on the thumbnail opens the correct, full photo. Clicking on pictures from my Venice trip opens them properly.

Any ideas for fixing this?

Mac Pro, macOS High Sierra (10.13.3), 32GB RAM, 6-core 2.4GHz, USB 3.0

Posted on Apr 20, 2018 10:14 AM

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Answer 1

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léonie

Level 10

194,733 points

Apr 20, 2018 11:50 AM in response to myaka

When I click on any of the six new pictures, Photos instead opens pictures from Venice, Italy that I took with my iPhone five months ago.

Try to rebuild the thumbnails for these photos.

You can do that by selecting the photos and then rotating them back and forth.

First rotate them counterclockwise by entering the key combination ⌘R
Then rotate them clockwise by entering the key combination ⌥⌘R

After this, the photos should be showing the correct thumbnail for the photos they are bound to.

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Answer 2

myaka Author

Level 4

2,777 points

Apr 20, 2018 12:03 PM in response to léonie

Thank you for the advice. It worked the first time for a few. Some I had to rotate back and forth several times. One was stubborn. Each time I rotated it back and forth, it showed me a picture from successively later parts of a trip through Italy and France. I had deleted a close duplicate of that one, and the duplicate was still in Photos's trash, so I recovered it (which worked fine with no rotation) and deleted the one that rotating could not seem to fix.

Strangely, when I decided that one portrait shot I had fixed with your instructions would be better in landscape -- and rotated it -- it brought up photos from other parts of the same European trip, then from a trip one year earlier.

Rotating it now just keeps bringing up other different photos than the thumbnail shows. I will perform another repair. Hope springs eternal in the human breast.

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Answer 3

myaka Author

Level 4

2,777 points

Apr 20, 2018 12:54 PM in response to myaka

Repaired library -- the problem thumbnail remaining still showed the wrong photo --

This time, however, rotating it fixed the issue, even after setting it from portrait to landscape.

All's well that ends well.

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Answer 4

myaka Author

Level 4

2,777 points

Apr 22, 2018 9:33 AM in response to léonie

léonie --

Thanks again for your advice.

I had, strangely, the same issue on a Mac Pro (same OS and Photos version) when organizing some old photos.

Rotating right and left (or the reverse) had no effect -- however -- flipping the photo horizontally, then undoing the flip brought about the desired result.

Not sure why this is happening on two machines (each with separate Photos libraries), but I'm glad to have insight now about manipulating thumbnails to make things work again.

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