Gray Thumbnails

Lightroom 3 seems to lose track of my files and I get gray thumbnails in the directory instead of images. When this happens, things slow down to less than a crawl. When I check the problem images in explorer I notice that they don't have XMP files. I tried moving all of the images with thumbs to a new directory and removed all the gray thumb images from lightroom. I was able to reimport them with thumbs. When I attempted to merge the images that were originally ok with the reimported problem images, I found that some of the formerly good files now didn't contain xmp files. I've backed up and optimized. Everything worked fine in the Beta - but I've had nothing but trouble since I loaded the production version.

To answer the questions, these are jpegs and they show as missing in "Develop".
They should also be missing in the 'Library' module, or you have some serious issues. Lightroom uses a database system that keeps track of many things, inculding the location of files on your hard drive. When you "move" or "delete" files and/or subfolders outside of LR (i.e. using Window Explorer), they still remain in LR's database. This is why you see the '?' on the thumbnails.
The best advice I can give you is to only move, delete, or rename files and folders inside Lightroom. There is a very good online LR 3 User Manual here:
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Lightroom/3.0/Using/index.html
For assistance with moving, renaming and locating missing folders:
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Lightroom/3.0/Using/WSE828B644-9097-46ab-98A7-E2719BBB6647.htm l

Similar Messages

Ugh tI have gray thumbnails of my photos. I cannot find my photos through the finder. what do I do?

I have gray thumbnails of my photos. I cannot find my photos through the finder. what do I do?

I have gray thumbnails of my photos. I cannot find my photos through the finder.
Gray thumbnils:
Back Up and try rebuild the library: hold down the command and option (or alt) keys while launching iPhoto. Use the resulting dialogue to rebuild. Include the options to rebuild the thumbnails. It may take three or four goes to work.
Finding the Photos through the Finder.
It's not supported. Accessing the files via the Finder can lead to a corrupted Library.
There are many, many ways to access your files in iPhoto: You can use any Open / Attach / Browse dialogue. On the left there's a Media heading, your pics can be accessed there. Command-Click for selecting multiple pics.
(Note the above illustration is not a Finder Window. It's the dialogue you get when you go File -> Open)
You can access the Library from the New Message Window in Mail:
There's a similar option in Outlook and many, many other apps. If you use Apple's Mail, Entourage, AOL or Eudora you can email from within iPhoto.
If you use a Cocoa-based Browser such as Safari, you can drag the pics from the iPhoto Window to the Attach window in the browser.
If you want to access the files with iPhoto not running:
For users of 10.6 and later: You can download a free Services component from MacOSXAutomation which will give you access to the iPhoto Library from your Services Menu.
Using the Services Preference Pane you can even create a keyboard shortcut for it.
For Users of 10.4 and 10.5 Create a Media Browser using Automator (takes about 10 seconds) or use this free utility Karelia iMedia Browser
Other options include:
Drag and Drop: Drag a photo from the iPhoto Window to the desktop, there iPhoto will make a full-sized copy of the pic.
File -> Export: Select the files in the iPhoto Window and go File -> Export. The dialogue will give you various options, including altering the format, naming the files and changing the size. Again, producing a copy.
Show File: a. On iPhoto 09 and earlier: Right- (or Control-) Click on a pic and in the resulting dialogue choose 'Show File'. A Finder window will pop open with the file already selected. 3.b.
b: On iPhoto 11 and later: Select one of the affected photos in the iPhoto Window and go File -> Reveal in Finder -> Original. A Finder window will pop open with the file already selected.

I only see gray thumbnails in Library.

I jusr downloaded Lightroom 3. When Importing files, all I get are gray thumbnails. The data on the photos seems to be there.

There are usually 2 causes for this kind of symptom:
Corrupt monitor profile:
Re-calibrate your monitor or temporarily assign an sRGB profile to your monitor to see if it helps.
Correupt previews
Rename the [catalogname] Previews.lrdata (as in LRDATA) folder and let LR build new previews. If it helped, delete the renamed folder.
Beat Gossweiler
Switzerland

Multiple Crashes, Gray Thumbnails

Wow, am I having problems with version 7.01. first, could not import a simple I movie hd project of less than five mins of movie. Second, crashed at least ten times will importing movie files from my hard drive. third, would crash while generating thumbnails and the final third of my clips were in gray, no thumbnail at all. This software sure seems to be very buggy to me! I am running this on a macbook, and just simple video clilps from my digital camera. I could not run a voiceover with any precision, and all I wanted to do was post a short clip up to my web gallery..
feed back appreciated.
Paul
ps. wonder if I would have better luck using a real minidv cam.

I am not sure why it crashed in the first place. I remember I tried to import some video clips. When I switched between the projects and doing other things, I think iMovie crashed. Then, when I returned to the application, most of the previously imported clips turned gray. iMovie tried to re-create those thumbnails without any success. Finally, it crashed again - over and over again. The movie clips themselves were fine when I viewed the original .dv clips in their folders. I think the thumbnails were corrupted and iMovie went into an endless loop and decided to crash. This is a major bug in the software and it has happened to be rather frequently. I think I have the solution but hopefully Apple will fix that in future updates.

Gray Thumbnails for Events and others

Hello,
I've searched and tried everything to fix this and nothing seems to work.
I had a laptop running 10.5.8 and iPhoto 09. I copied the iPhoto library to a new MPB running 10.6.1 and iPhoto 09. Both versions of iPhoto were fully updated. When I opened iPhoto, all my thumbnails were gray. If I click all the way to the picture, it's still there. I also had Keyword Manager installed, but when I tried installing it on the new laptop, it didn't fix the problem.
I've tried repairing permissions with Disk Utility as well as rebuilding the small thumbnails, rebuilding the thumbnail cache and repairing library using the optioncommandopen utility.
Any help would be more than appreciated

Rebuilding the thumbnails can take several goes In my experience.
If that fails:
Download iPhoto Library Manager and use its rebuild function. This will create a new library based on data in the albumdata.xml file. Not everything will be brought over - no slideshows, books or calendars, for instance - but it should get all your albums and keywords back.
Because this process creates an entirely new library and leaves your old one untouched, it is non-destructive, and if you're not happy with the results you can simply return to your old one.
Regards
TD

Gray thumbnails and can't drag and drop clips

I've been using iMovie 11 for a while now, and have accumulated more footage than my Mac HD can hold, so I migrated all my iMovie Events to an external HD. Everything still worked fine for several days after I moved the videos, but then a few days later, when I launched iMovie, all the clip thumbnails (Events and Projects) appear gray, a thumbnail only appearing wherever I leave the mouse, and I cannot drag and drop clips, neither from Events to Project, nor within a Project.
I've searched the web for answers and found things like deleting the cache and thumbnails so that iMovie regenerates them, or deleting the playlist file in the library, but none of these solutions worked.
I am in the middle of a big project so I would appreciate a solution that doesn't involve erasing all my stuff and starting again....

The external drive I'm using is a 2TB RAID connected by firewire and it is almost constantly in use, I am always able to access all sorts of files on it, including the videos, so I doubt that would be the problem. Nevertheless, I did as you suggest, but as expected, it made no difference.
In the meantime, I have also created a new iMovie Event and have started re-importing all the videos as a backup solution, but that will take a few days. The new event that I have created so far works normally though, the thumbnails appear and I can drag and drop clips. While I am at it, I will import these videos in to several Events rather than have all that footage in one Event, so if something goes wrong it won't be as problematic and it might even allow the identification of a clip which might be the cause of all this.
So right now I simultaneously have one Event (the new one I just created) which works perfectly, and the older Event which still doesn't work properly. So as a last resort I can probably also create a new Project and try and duplicate as much as possible from the one I am currently working on and hopefully that should work. However, if there is a quicker, less tedious solution, I'll gladly take it.

Tried "everything" and LOTS of iPhoto 6 thumbnails still broken

I have the "Gray" Thumbnail problem in spades on BOTH my wife's and my PowerBooks running 10.4.6. As per many other postings, various Thumbnails gray with exclamation mark, and they will not link to photo on a double-click. I currently have just over 10k photos with approximately 10% displaying the problem. My wife's system has about 8k photos, with about 40% broken! THATS A LOT TO RE-IMPORT and a LOT of meta-data to loose...
I Have:
* Repaired Permissions (Multiple Times)
* Rebuilt iPhoto at startup (Multiple Times)
* Rebuilt iPhoto using iPhoto Library Manager (Multiple Times)
* Tried a new iPhoto Library, which worked but a couple of hundred photos do not a library make...
* Checked for the missing Color Sync file recommended in one posting.
BOTTOM LINE: NONE of the above one of helped repair our libraries.
Are there any NEW or revelatory suggestions or recipes to solve this obviously wide-spread problem, that I haven't listed above or might have missed?
Thanks in advance! SRJaynes
PowerBook G4 Mac OS X (10.4.6)
PowerBook G4 Mac OS X (10.4.6)

Hi, SRJ. Sorry to hear that both of you are having the problem.
- Did you move or reorganize photos in your iPhoto library? Rebuilding and many of the other methods won't help if users manually move folders or photos around inside the library.
- Do you have the preference to copy photos into your library or do you keep them in an external folder and simply let iPhoto link to them?
- Usually people just let the library start in the Pictures folder of their account and then hook up their cameras and let pictures download. They might edit the pictures in iPhoto, create albums, order a few books, etc. I'm not suggesting you stay within these narrow lines (hey I don't), but it would help people on the board understand the problem better if you could detail anything unusual that you do that could have triggered a known problem.
- What kind of images do you import? RAW (what kind?), JPG? Any other types?
- Anything that the images that don't appear might have in common? e.g. they were all edited with some application, or they were all portrait images, or all were used in some album, book, anything?

No Preview Available in Thumbnails

The past couple of times when I have tried to import pictures from my camera into Lightroom 3, when the thumbnails finally come up, it is just a gray box that says no preview available. I have a little over 28,000 pictures in my catalog and have had no problems importing until recently. I optimize and back up my catalog everytime I use Lightroom, but it is getting slower and slower at importing. Tonight when I tried to import, it just froze and even after waiting about 10 minutes even the gray thumbnails hadn't shown up in the previews. Before tonight, once I imported them, I could preview them. I am importing RAW pictures that average in size from 7 to 15mb, but this has not been a problem until the last 2 imports. Has anyone else had this problem and what can I do to make it where I can import my pictures again?

I am importing images straight from a Canon T1i using a USB port. I have had not problems importing this like this until the last 2 imports and it started giving the grey thumbnails after about 15 pictures had imported out of 167 pictures. The next import would only give the grey thumbnails saying no preview available and when I tried to import tonight it just froze up and still hadn't imported any pictures at all. I am using Windows 7 with a 6GB ram, 64 Bit OS with Intel core Duo CPU T6600 2.2GHz

Missing photos thumbnails...

I have a freind who is having this problem. In her iMovie when she clicks on her Photos tab a number of images do not show up. The Title is there, there is a space for them but no images. She clicks on the space and it doesn't show up in Ken Burns it doesn't give her the option to move the "blank" space to do anything with it,
Her library is about 10000 images and have I hit some limit that iMovie can't address?
This also happens in iDVD, and Motion as well.
her machine is a DP 2.0 G5 with 4.5 gigs of RAM
Mac OS 10.4.2
iMovie 5.0.2
iPhoto 5.0.4
thanks in advanced!

Hi froghead2,
The iPhoto library is probably corrupted. Try to rebuild it.
iPhoto 5: Fixing blank, gray thumbnails
iPhoto 4 or later: Rebuilding the iPhoto Library

IPhoto 5.0.4 Grey thumbnails

upgrade to iPhoto 5 shows 1900 grey thumbnails and 100
pictures in my library from iPhoto 4 with 2000 photos
I rebuilt the iPhoto library and have 1900 grey thumbnails
and 2000 photos the albums if selected bring up
the grey thumbnails
Anyway I can fix it?

Hi CozMacRay,
The upgrade to 5.0.4 and the rebuild of the Library are two of the fixes for the gray thumbnails. You have tried both and they didn't help.
You can check out these two pages and see if there is anything else you can try.
If nothing works, you may have to follow the instructions on Page 2 to create a new library.
iPhoto Help
iPhoto Help 2
good luck and get back with any results.

Messed up Camera Roll thumbnails from iPhone5 iCloud restore

Has anyone else experienced messed up thumbnails restoring from an iCloud backup to new iPhone5? There is a huge section in my Camera Roll where the 2nd and 4th columns do not display thumbnail images. Same with Photostream. I can click on the gray thumbnail and see the image so I know they're there. It is just messed up thumbnails. I'm not sure how to fix this?

I'm having the exact same problem, did you find a solution?

A Tale of Woe and a Lesson to be Learned

A Tale of Woe
Well, it happened to me last night. I went to open the iPhoto 5 library dedicated to my latest book project and voilà, I had the dreaded gray thumbnails and the SWOD white, blank Edit window that comes up after double-clicking on one of those gray puppies. An I experienced exactly what many of you have felt, an tremendous sinking in the pit of my stomach.
So after the invectives were over I went about trying to determine what exactly had happened to corrupt the database file in that library. After pondering my previous iPhoto usage yesterday I determined that the damage must have occurred when I went to launch iPhoto 4 to check out a problem posted by a user in the Discussions forum. Since that book library was the last V5 library to be opened, it was the library of record in the preference file. Since both V4 and V5 use the same preference file V4 tried to open the book library and gave me the this library was created by a later version of iPhoto... blah blah blah message. I quit, launched V4 with the Option key depressed and went on my merry way.
Later I decided to go back to working on the book, launched iPhoto Buddy, selected the book library and tried to open that library. So here we are, staring at a large number of little gray squares.
I then briefly tried some of the wonderful advice Ive been shelling out these past months and guess, what? Nada! Im quickly becoming convinced that once you get the gray boxes that library is pretty much history. I cant remember a successful recovery. (You can, however, recover for file renaming via the Finder in iPhoto 5 libraries, a different problem).
Realizing that that library was toast (no reflection on Roxio), I mounted my backup HD and copied the backup copy of the library into my Pictures folder. Since it was updated after the last time I worked on that library I lost no effort and was back in the saddle in no time.
The Lesson to be Learned
BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP!!!!! I know not everyone can afford a second HD to facilitate frequent and easy backing up of critical files but its something all should give serious consideration too. Modest sized (80 G) FireWire hard drives are down where they are not entirely out of reach. Many files can be replaced, memos, letters, applications, etc. but when it comes to family photos and the memories they invoke, theres no going back. This also applies for other types of photos as well, not just family photos. If your hard drive has enough free space that would allow you to have a second copy of your iPhoto library without reducing the overall free space to where you might have performance problems I strongly suggest you make a copy and put it somewhere else in your User folder, maybe Documents and then use a backup application, as many of you know I like Synk, to backup your library after each use. In the backup mode this would take under 30 seconds as youre only copying/adding changed and new files. The next best thing is to backup to CD/DVDs. Slower but just as safe.
Sorry to have rambled in this Sunday morning sermon but after experiencing firsthand last night what many of you have been posting about I felt compelled to so some preaching (or rather some strong urging).
Hope this has been of some help. Good luck.
OT

I was at first stunned and heartbroken reading of Old Toad's loss.
Then of course relieved to know he had of course practiced what he preaches -- have an accessible backup in the right format to get back in business.
"Backup" and "Don't Tamper" (with the iPhoto Library Folder) are two essential guidelines to enjoying a trouble free iLife.
The third essential guideline is to be very careful in the wanton downloading and use of third party applications that work with the delicate if not ornery iPhoto librarian.
Old Toad would never blunder in a pure Apple/OSX/ iPhoto setup.
But he was having fun with his buddy iPhoto Buddy and his latest flirtation - the sexy little download PreferenceSetter.
IPhoto sat back - furious and jealous - just waiting for Old Toad to make one tiny little misstep. Either he did or his third party friends did. Photo management has no fury like iPhoto scorned.
For the resourceful Anicent and Venerable Amphibian it was nothing but a momentary bump in the road. For others it could have been ugly.
Just remember this: If you are going to hang around Version Tracker looking to download any cute little easy (free) app that catches your eye, remember that iPhoto is watching and waiting. She is always watching and waiting for one tiny little misstep, . . .

With the following warning "ligheroom encountered an error when reading form its preview cache and n

with the following warning "ligheroom encountered an error when reading form its preview cache and needs to quit. lightroom will attempt to fix this problem the next time it lanuchse "
ligheroom progrem 5.4 64-bit is stopped
i can't use the Lightroom Progrem
and want to solve the problem As soon as possible

Delete preview cache - that should solve the problem.
It's the .lrdata folder in with your catalog, named something like "My Catalog Previews.lrdata".
Delete entire .lrdata folder, making sure you get the one in the same folder as the catalog you're opening. Do not delete anything else, and if you have something like "My Catalog Smart Previews.lrdata" - that's not it.
http://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/kb/preference-file-locations-lightroom-41.html
When Lr comes up, consider initiating whole-catalog building of standard previews (Library -> Previews menu), lest you be "forever" greeted by temporarily gray thumbnails and "loupe loading" indicator in the future..

Adobe Premiere Elements 13, will not display video picture, audio only. My video format is listed as compatible with Adobe.

Adobe Premiere Elements 13, will not display video picture, audio only. My videois listed as compatible with Adobe.

douglass
On what computer operating system is your Premiere Elements 13 running? Have you updated 13 to 13.1 yet using an opened project's Help Menu/Updates?
If not, please do so.
You have not given us enough information with which to help you.
What are the properties of your source file that is presenting in the project with audio but no video?
Quickest way to gain that information is from brand/model/settings of the camera that recorded the video.
I am looking for
video compression
audio compression
frame size
frame rate
interlaced or progressive
file extension
pixel aspect ratio
What does the file's thumbnail look like in Project Assets after it is imported....thumbnail with no image (gray), thumbnail with only an audio icon
within it, or other? On the Timeline, what do you see represented in Video 1....nothing as opposed to Audio 1 where you see the audio portion of
the file?
Do you have the latest version of QuickTime installed on your computer along with Premiere Elements 13/13.1? Are you running the programs as
administrator?
Is your video card/graphics card driver version up to date according to the web site of the manufacturer of the card?
Let us start here. Based on your reply details, we will customize troubleshooting strategy for you.
Thanks.
ATR

Why is the music clip marked with a yellow warning sign?

While browsing my project library today, I noticed that every music clip associated with a particular project is marked with a yellow "warning" triangle (with an exclamation point in the center). What's worse, the music won't play.
I had previously uploaded this video to YouTube, where it now plays just fine. But I'm still puzzled by the warning sign, and by the fact that the music won't play when I take a look at it in my Project Library.
I've never had a warning sign like this emerge in connection with anything else I've put together with iMovie. Why is it there, and why are the music clips inoperative? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Hi !
I have a question. I had that little warning sign as well but in the clip I had just imported into the event library... I don't understand because when I went to the folder in which iMovie copies the clips I import, it was right there. Same name, same size, same runtime... and it played perfectly; and I could preview the clip in iMovie. But the thumbnail was gray with that little sign. Also, I couldn't delete the clip from my library.
I closed iMovie, started it again... the clip is in the library, no more gray thumbnail and little yellow sign.
How is that possible ?!

Gray Thumbnails

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for