Trying to help a friend using MacOS 15.5 and Photos App.
She keeps her photos (all jpgs, from iphone and a Canon camera) in a folder on the desktop and references them in Photos. All local, nothing cloud.
In thumbnails/grid view, some photos are just empty white boxes.
She can click on them to edit and gets the message “Cannot Start Editing/Photos cannot load edits for this image” with only an “OK” button (and the space the image should fill is blank behind the message).
If she clicks away the message, and checks the image info, the file name and metadata for the camera are there and correct.
Online search results have come up with suggestions like rebuilding the library, rebooting, cloudy stuff and so on. Nothing yet found where the problem is clearly solved.
Does she not want the management that comes with importing copies into Photos? I don’t really think that it will work as an external editor very well. Has she tried to import them into Photos?
Thanks @raykloss, please clarify what extra advantages would come from having photos in the Photos Library. I too am using Photos in a ‘referenced’ mode and while a light user of the app, it edits the photos and creates Albums etc. My friend also wants to work in this way.
I have deselected the Setting for adding imports to the Library. Under the setting is a notation from Apple that only photos in the Library can be uploaded to iCloud, perhaps that’s what you mean.
It seems odd though that Photos can ‘lose’ its info about edits made to images. My friend is not the type to go fiddling in settings or moving the Library around etc. Also, the doesn’t seem to be any pattern in which images this happens to.
Anyone tried to “Repair” the Library lately? I used to Rebuild things like Mail and photo libraries in the past, sometimes it helped.
The linked Apple article only refers vaguely to the kinds of issues this could resolve though.
One of the big dangers of using Apple Photos in Referenced mode (as opposed to Managed mode) is that Photos can lose contact with where the masters/originals are. White thumbnails implies this might be the case, but it might be something else.
Aperture and Lightroom Classic also use Referenced photos but both have powerful tools for reconnecting the masters if they become disconnected. I always advise friends and relatives to use Photos in managed library mode. If you are going to use iCloud it has to be in managed library mode.
The idea of committing all my precious masters to a proprietary library worries me a lot so I have always kept a second set of all my photos in plain folders as insurance. I export from Photos to this once a month.
Good points, @mikebhm, both self and friend have fairly large collections of photos and limited storage on the laptops so would like to avoid duplicating them all by putting them in managed.
I use Photos app sparingly and have not run into the issue of blank thumbnails myself.
Consequently I don’t have detailed knowledge of how Photos handles managed and the level of risk of having everything in one library file. Sounds like you have a good system for this.
Neither of us uses or wants to use iCloud for Photos.