Black thumbnails in iPhoto

[Phil St. Romain]

I never had any problems with iPhoto (v. 6.0.5), but last week any photo or file imported showed as a black thumbnail. Clicking on the thumbnail brought up the picture just fine. I tried rebuilding the thumbnails and the library database, and this made all my thumbnails black! The only way to fix this was to use a backed up Pictures folder; importing still brought blanks after restoring.

I searched the net, especially Apple's iPhoto forum, and tried a few fixes, but nothing has worked. I then tried from my test user folder, which had nothing in the Pictures folder, and still got black thumbnails. Thinking the problem might be the app, I moved v. 6.0.5 to my desktop and re-installed v. 6.0. Still a problem, even in the test user folder.

So what would cause iPhoto to suddenly behave this way? What else might I try to fix this? The app is pretty useless to me if I can't get thumbnails of imported images to show.

[bramley]

This may be no help at all - but I notice that the Aperture user notes (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=305121) for 10.4.9 state ...
Reduces issues of temporary "black" Viewer: Mac OS X 10.4.9 addresses several issues that could cause the Viewer to temporarily turn black when displaying adjusted images.
... which seems similar to your problem. Have you upgraded to 10.4.9?

If so I also notice that iPhoto is now at version 6.0.6 not 6.0.5. (Was that a typo?) It's possible that iPhoto must be upgraded to work with 10.4.9 so that the problem with Aperture can be resolved.

[Phil St. Romain]

I'm using 10.4.8 on an iMac G5 (2 Ghz, 1 G Ram, 120 G). iPhoto was upgraded last week, but still shows 6.0.5. I don't have Aperture.

I usually wait a week or two before upgrading my OS to read up on possible problems. I doubt upgrading to 10.4.9 will fix the iPhoto problem, but I'll let you know.

Thanks for trying to help.

[edalzell]

I just recently saw something similar. I have upgraded to 10.4.9 and iPhoto 6.0.6.

I had scanned in some pictures and wanted to put them in my iPhoto library, so I just dragged them into the library with the mouse. And then like you, they were black.

I didn't find a solution to this problem and I have yet to import any pictures from our digital camera to see if that produces the same results.

The images were scanned on an Epson Perfection 1240U using Apple's Image Capture. The images open fine in GraphicConverter.