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Photo Booth freezes/crashes after starting

Hello all, hoping somebody can lend a hand here as I'm absolutely at my wits end. If this is in the wrong community please let me know so I can attempt to get others to help with this

I recently upgraded to os Mojave last week and ever since I did Photo Booth refuses to work. It opens, shows a black screen for the camera along with grey squares for past images I've taken (or if i'm lucky i'll atleast see their preview images) and then hangs forever with the spinning beach ball of doom until I force quit. like so:


User uploaded file


Iā€™m fairly certain whatever the issue is has to do with Photo Booth attempting to connect to the camera as I notice that it freezes after the green light of the camera turns on but unsure how to exactly confirm.


Steps I've already attempted:


*Iā€™ll note here in advance that Iā€™ve attempted all of these with no other program that uses the camera open.

*No new software other than os Mojave has been added or changed lately


  • Restarting.
  • Confirmed it's not the built in iSight camera as the camera works fine in any other program.
  • Confirmed system is fully updated.
  • Deleted the Photo Booth preferences located in the Library > Preferences folder.
  • Deleted the Photo Booth Library folder in my Pictures folder.
  • Opened in Low Resolution mode by ctrl + clicking the application.
  • Ran Disk Utility First Aid
  • Reset PMU by shutting the mac down, holding shift + control + option and the power button all at the same time for 10 seconds and booting up again.
  • Ran the command ā€ sudo kill all VDCAssistant ā€œ in Terminal. (When this was attempted I received the message: ā€œ kill: illegal process id: all ā€œ which i confess Iā€™m not sure confirms I did it correctly? im assuming but figured i'd mention.)
  • Reinstalled os Mojave.


And I THINK thatā€™s about everything, no dice each time but I any one of these may work for anyone having the same issue! I've scoured a LOT in an attempt to fix this lol


Additional info:


MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015)

Processor: 2.7 GHz Intel Core i5

Memory: 8 GB 1867 MHz DDR3

Graphics: Intel Iris Graphics 6100 1536 MB

Photo Booth version 10.0

Anything more I can provide please let me know! I'd love to include the crash report if it'd help but it's uh very long, not sure if theres a point to posting. I'd reeeally like to use this program again if possible so hereā€™s hoping itā€™s not that the new os update killed it, thanks in advance!!

Mac Pro, macOS Mojave (10.14.1)

Posted on Nov 13, 2018 12:16 PM

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6 replies

Nov 28, 2018 8:03 AM in response to CMCSK

Ah I'm afraid that's no dice either šŸ˜Ÿ I had listed I tried resetting the "PMU" which either I was confused by the article I was reading and had meant SMC OR they have the exact same commands. I wish it was possible to tell if you've pulled it off correctly, unless there is but i've tried multiple times and haven't seen any indication my Macbook recognize what i was doing :/


Thanks anyway! Covers my bases and had me try it again, I've pretty much given up hope of ever using this program again haha

Nov 28, 2018 8:42 AM in response to kidzikcan

Another thing to mention I've tried was deleting the Photo Booth Cache folder found under Library > Cache

Interesting thing happened when I did this, Photo Booth didn't stall immediatly and was actually responsive for a couple minutes! The camera still couldn't connect and none of the main program worked but I could access the menus on the top of the screen. This led nowhere however, not much I can do with the menus. After a while it went back to the same usual fully unresponsive program. Still, something noteworthy I suppose.

Photo Booth freezes/crashes after starting

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