Some iphoto pictures not usable as desktop background

I want to set my desktop background as a slideshow of my favourite iPhoto'08 pictures. While experimenting, I've discovered that some of my iPhoto pictures don't seem to work as a desktop background.
Here's what I do (and note that I'm translating from a Swedish version of OSX here):
Right-click on the desktop, choose 'Change desktop background'. In the 'Desktop and Screensaver' dialog, Desktop tab, scroll down the left-hand side list of iPhoto albums (among other things), and select my favourite iPhoto album (Flagged). Wait for the previews to load. Select one of the pictures.
Now, what happens can be one of two things. Either I'll see a slightly bigger preview in the left upper corner of the dialog and I'll see the desktop background change to the picture in question. Or I'll only see the slightly bigger preview in the left upper corner, and the desktop background will turn a boring solid color.
Now, iPhoto itself has no problems with these pictures, and shows them properly. Also, if I use the little + below the left-hand side list to add a folder on the harddrive directly to the list, I can get the broken pictures to show up correctly, as long as I don't go through iPhoto.
So, yeah, that gives me a potential workaround: Export my favourite album now and then, and use the exported folder as background slideshow source. I'd rather have a better solution, where things just work like they're supposed to.
The pattern I've noticed is that iPhoto-modified pictures work fine, non-iPhoto-modified pictures don't seem to work. (That is, if right-clicking on a preview in iPhoto has the menu item 'Show original file' active, the picture will work, if the item is greyed out, the picture won't work.)
A relevant detail in this may be that I've set iPhoto to not copy imported pictures into the library.
Any hints, clues? Now what?

Welcome to the Apple Discussions.
I think this relates to using a Referenced Library:
iPhoto-modified pictures work fine, non-iPhoto-modified pictures don't seem to work.
In other words, iPhoto will share the files it controls (the modifieds are inside the Library Package) and not the ones that it wont.
Simple test: Create a Managed Library (Hold down the option (or alt) key key and launch iPhoto. From the resulting menu select 'Create Library', import a few pics and see if that works as expected.
Regards
TD

Similar Messages

  • Can not change my desktop background

    for some reason when i changed my desktop background to a photo from my picture folder, i cant seem to undo it. i cant even get into the desktop and screen saver preferences. as soon as i click on the desktop preferences, a window pops up and says " the application sysyem preferences quit unexpectedly....... it then asks me if i want to reopen,report,or close." if i reopen, it goes through the same thing again. i also reported this to apple. i dont know if it will do anything, but owell.
    is there anyway to reset this?
    is the image that i chose for my background (jpeg) have something to do with this?
    please, if anyone can help me with this, it will be greatly appreciated.
    MacBook Pro   Mac OS X (10.4.7)  

    i have had this exact same problem for quite a while now, i have tried niel's suggeston but that didn't work for me. i just put up with it and when i do want to change my desktop i open iPhoto select a picture and go share/desktop. but if someone has a better solution i'd love to hear it.

  • For some reason, I cannot change my desktop background no matter how many times I delete the "active" folder.  It's as if it's locked.  Any ideas how I can fix it?

    For some reason, I cannot change my desktop background no matter how many times I delete the "active" folder.  It's as if it's locked.  Any ideas how I can fix it?

    Yes it sounds like you have a corrupted preference file.
    The setting you make in individual programs get saved to a Preference file in your Users/Library/Preferences folder.
    All you have to do is drag out the old file to the desktop, reboot and load the program and the preference file gets rebuilt without your preferences which you reset.
    For your case I beleive the preference file is
    com.apple.desktop.plist

  • The display photo of some iPhoto pictures do not match the actual photo. How do I fix it?

    When I open an album, the icon of some photos are not the same as the photo when I open it.

    May be a good idea to post question in the iPhoto section of Support for more visitors

  • Some iPhoto pictures missing after time machine recovery, were there errors reported during backup that I missed?

    Hello. I used time machine/time capsule to automatically back up my sytem over the last 3 years and I used the backups to recover my system to a new hard drive when the original drive began to fail. After recovery, I noticed there are missing photos in iPhoto.
    I'm curios where I should look to see why they weren't backed up, and why it wasn't obvious to me at the time that they weren't backed up.
    Does time machine explicitly call out issues when it can't back up a file or does it just squirrel a message away in the system log?
    I'd like to know because I'd like avoid this issue going forward.
    Full disclosure & History -
    The hard drive on my late 2009 27" iMac was exhibiting issues and started to go bad. No problem I thought, I'll get a new one and recover the system from my time capsule.
    The full recovery was initiated from the OS install media. Upon recovery, the system wouldn't boot. After booting from the OS install media and reinstalling the OS on top of the recovered data the system booted and seemed to retain almost everything. This may not be the best way to recover but it seemed to work.
    I additionally had to:
    repatch the OS
    reinstall iWork
    relicense MS Office (otherwise office seemed to be intact)
    When I started looking through my iPhoto libraries, there were some events with no pictures (mostly the newer events). I couldn't find the pictures on the time capsule either so I'm curios if there was anyway I could have known that backups weren't completing successfully. I had run a time machine incremental backup before pulling out the old hard drive and it seemed to complete successfully so I'm at a loss. I can understand that as the hard drive began to fail, there may have been issues backing up the data, but I somehow missed it if/when the problems were reported.
    Should I go through the old system logs that were backed up on the time capsule and look for backupd messages/errors? Going forward, how do I know if there are backup issues?
    It took me a couple weeks to realize the drive was failing. I had noticed that the system performance was getting bad, and the system would occassionally hang. It would come back OK after a restart. I thought it was because the filesystem was getting close to full (30GB left on a 1 TB drive) so I was chasing down cleaning up some data to make more room. There were suggestions in other forums to try and keep the filesystem 10% free.
    While moving data from the internal drive to a new external drive (to free up space) the system would hang. I eventually found a couple disk0 errors in the kernel log and I actually witnessed disk0 disappear while running an iostat. I'm thinking it took me too long to know the disk was going bad, and so the pictures I imported over the last 3-4 weeks may be gone.
    I still have the original drive so I'll see if anything else can be salvaged from it.
    Looking for some suggestions on
    1) the ability to know if time machine backups are successful and are in sync with my system
    2) the ability to know when there are hardware issues that I should be aware of
    If you got to this point, thanks for taking the time to read through all this.
    Regards,
    -mike

    Hi Mike,
    I just saw this post and saw no one has responded.  You might have figured out but in case, I wanted to let you know what I found out.  I had the same problem.  Hard drive failure, they installed a new one and my iPhoto pictures were missing.  I couldn't find them on Time Machine either which baffled (and frustrated) me b/c I just backed up my drive and I was missing pictures from over a year ago. 
    I found this article and it allowed me to at least find my pictures...so they weren't lost after all. 
    https://discussions.apple.com/message/16029742#16029742
    As for why they aren't showing up in iPhoto or Time Machine, the lady at the Mac store said it is probably an OS conflict.  Which makes sense since I can see the actual pictures in the iPhoto content file (per the article mentioned above).  However, I didn't have my computer with me at the store to have a Genius person help me resolve the conflict.
    BUT, if you can find the pictures, then maybe you can reimport them into iPhoto?  Just a thought.
    Good luck!

  • How do I create a pdf file of some iPhoto pictures

    I deal with some client servers that will not allow embedded pictures in email message to pass through their firewall.  So, I need to create a pdf file of some of my iPhoto pictures to send as an email pdf attachment.  Can anyone help?  I'm at a loss in trying to accomplish this.  I have an iMac 27" running OS X 10.9.4 and iPhoto '09 version 8.1.2.

    Use Pages (word processor) to put/arrange your images. Once done, save the document as a PDF file and attach it to your outgoing mail. 

  • Iphoto pictures not showing in "my pictures"

    I've just made the switch from PC to Mac, and most days I find the switch to be easy. However, there are some things I just can't seem to figure out... such as:
    I transferred all the pictures from my PC to my Mac via an external hard drive. When I dumped all the pics on my Mac, and imported them into Iphoto, I realized that any changes I made in Iphoto did not alter the same pics in my "pictures" folder in the Finder. When I went looking for the answer to that problem, I was told to delete all of the photos from my "pictures" file, and then I could edit away and delete at will in Iphoto. The problem is, now if I want to upload pictures onto the web, I have to export the pictures back to my "pictures" folder", because you can't go into Iphoto through the Finder.
    Am I missing something? Does this even make sense? I'm sure (I hope!) there's some really easy step that I'm missing along the way...
    Thanks for your time.

    Your photos are in a package now
    You can always export them
    To edit them in a program other than iPhoto you should go to the iphoto preferences ==> general and select edit iphoto in application and select the application you want to use. IF you want to have the option of editing in iPhoto or that application, now leave the application selected and go back to edit in main window - then whey you right click on a photo the contextual menu will give you the option to edit in your selected editing application. When you use the external application be sure to just save (NOT save as) when you are finished so iPhoto keeps the photos and knows that they have been modified.
    If you are running Leopard, You also can select photos from the open dialogue box by selecting column view and clicking on photos in the media section in the left hand sidebar
    for more information see this thread - http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5998226&#5998226
    Larry Nebel

  • Iphoto pictures not showing up in slideshow

    I only have 19 pictures in my iphoto library--created from different "rolls" from emails. When I create a slide show of these pictures (from either the iphoto library of from an album that currently has the same 19 pictures), four of the pictures don't show up in the slideshow. In the slideshow preview, they appear "gray" (and the picture flashes behind the gray for less than a second), and when viewing the slideshow, these four pictures view as black. These four pictures view just fine from either the iphoto library or from the album. Why is this happening, and what are my options to get this resolved?

    Riona:
    Welcome to the Apple Discussions. When I've tried to duplicate and the fix the problem I've not had any success. You can try rebuilding the library using iPhoto Library Manager. It does not touch or modify the original library. Here's how:
    Using iPhoto Library Manager to Rebuild Your iPhoto Library
    Download iPhoto Library Manager and launch.
    Click on the Add Library button, navigate to your User/Pictures folder and select your iPhoto Library folder.
    Now that the library is listed in the left hand pane of iPLM, click on your library and go to the File->Rebuild Library menu option
    In the next window name the new library and select the location you want it to be placed.
    Click on the Create button.
    Note: It can take some time to create the new library if you have a lot of photos. One user reported that with a library of about 5,000 images it took about 12 hours so plan ahead.
    If that doesn't solve the problem the only way to get a working library that I know of is to start a new library and import the Originals folder from the old one. Here's how:
    1 - first, to salvage your keywords, follow the workflow in Tutorial #1. If you don't care about losing the keywords you can skip this step.
    2 - move your existing library to the desktop.
    3 - move the Originals folder from that library folder to the desktop.
    4 - launch iPhoto and, when asked, select the option to create a new library.
    5 - drag the Originals folder from the desktop into the open iPhoto window.
    This will give you your photos back and in the same rolls that they were in the original library. The roll dates may be different but can be edited in the Information window at the bottom of the Source pane as you would edit file names.
    In the future I recommend that you make a backup copy of the Library6.iPhoto file that's in the iPhoto library folder. This contains all of the information needed by iPhoto to construct the library and is the file that usually gets corrupted and causes the exclamation mark issue. Keep the backup current, i.e. after any import into iPhoto.

  • Inability to sync Canon Ixus 75 via Iphoto (does not appear on Desktop)

    Hi all,
    My macbook does not seem to be able to read my Canon Ixus 75/SD750. Hence I am unable to sync it with Iphoto 6 via USB cable connected directly to it (when connected the camera does not appear on the desktop).
    Only way for me to sync it with Iphoto is to remove the SD card and connect it via a USB SD card reader.
    Any ideas/suggestions as to how I can sync it? Any Canon Ixus 75 or SD750 users out there ?
    Cheers.
    MacBook2,1, 120GB HDD, 2 GB RAM   Mac OS X (10.4.10)  

    Eric:
    Have you tried a different cable? If you have another Mac or access to one (or even a darkside computer) check to see if the camera can be recognized. That will determine if the camera to computer cable is good.
    I heartily second Terence's recommendation of using a card reader.
    Do you Twango?
    TIP: For insurance against the iPhoto database corruption that many users have experienced I recommend making a backup copy of the Library6.iPhoto database file and keep it current. If problems crop up where iPhoto suddenly can't see any photos or thinks there are no photos in the library, replacing the working Library6.iPhoto file with the backup will often get the library back. By keeping it current I mean backup after each import and/or any serious editing or work on books, slideshows, calendars, cards, etc. That insures that if a problem pops up and you do need to replace the database file, you'll retain all those efforts. It doesn't take long to make the backup and it's good insurance.
    I've written an Automator workflow application (requires Tiger), iPhoto dB File Backup, that will copy the selected Library6.iPhoto file from your iPhoto Library folder to the Pictures folder, replacing any previous version of it. You can download it at Toad's Cellar. Be sure to read the Read Me pdf file.

  • Photo gallery photos will not open for desktop background selection

    The photos I have in photo gallery will not open when trying to make changes to the background on desktop. Will also not open when trying to open them to e-bay.

    Start Firefox in [[Safe Mode]] to check if one of the add-ons is causing the problem (switch to the DEFAULT theme: Tools > Add-ons > Themes).
    * Don't make any changes on the Safe mode start window.
    See:
    * [[Troubleshooting extensions and themes]]
    * [[Troubleshooting plugins]]
    If it does work in Safe-mode then disable all extensions and then try to find which is causing it by enabling one at a time until the problem reappears.
    * Use "Disable all add-ons" on the [[Safe mode]] start window to disable all extensions.
    * Close and restart Firefox after each change via "File > Exit" (Mac: "Firefox > Quit"; Linux: "File > Quit")

  • IPhoto does not appear on desktop, only in Dashboard mode

    Hey guys,
    Has anyone had this problem - the iPhoto window does not appear on the desktop, and can only be seen in Dashboard mode. Once that tiny window in the Dashboard mode is clicked, the program hides.
    I hope to hear from someone soon about this. Thank you!

    Are you using separate desktops with Spaces? If so, try disable it and see if the window shows up. Otherwise you can try trash the com.apple.iphoto.plist file from the home / library / preferences folder
    Regards
    TD

  • IPhoto - pictures not showing in full screen

    Hi, I'm using iPhoto and have uploaded my pictures from camera (one I've always used before and had success with).  The pictures load and I can see the thumnails, but when I switch to view in full screen the picture flashes up really quickly and is replaced by an exclamation mark.  Any ideas as to what is wrong?  Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

    The "!" occurs when iPhoto has broken/lost the link/path to the original file.  Assuming you're running iPhoto 9 (11) apply the two fixes below in order as needed: 
    Fix #1
    Launch iPhoto with the Command+Option keys held down and rebuild the library.
    Since only one option can be run at a time start with Option #3, followed by #4 and then #1 as needed.
    Fix #2
    Using iPhoto Library Manager  to Rebuild Your iPhoto Library
    1 - download iPhoto Library Manager and launch.
    2 - click on the Add Library button, navigate to your Home/Pictures folder and select your iPhoto Library folder.
    3 - Now that the library is listed in the left hand pane of iPLM, click on your library and go to the File ➙ Rebuild Library menu option.
    4 - In the next  window name the new library and select the location you want it to be placed.
    5 - Click on the Create button.
    Note: This creates a new library based on the LIbraryData.xml file in the library and will recover Events, Albums, keywords, titles and comments.  However, books, calendars, cards and slideshows will be lost. The original library will be left untouched for further attempts at fixing the problem or in case the rebuilt library is not satisfactory.
    OT

  • Iphoto pictures not same on ipad and mac after editing

    If I edit a photo on my ipad (or iphone for that matter) and then transfer the photo to my iMac, the changes are not retained - the original photo is moved rather than the modified version.  e.g. I take the photo of two people and edit the photo on my ipad to remove one of the people, when I move the photo to the iMac, both people are still there.  Yet when I look at the photo on the ipad, only one is there.  It is as if the whole photo is retained on the ipad, but you can see your edits.  When you move it to the iMac, the changes are lost.   Is there any way to move the photo and have it retain the edits from the iPad?  thanks

    Hi Epper,
    Welcome to Apple Support Communities!
    It sounds like you're editing pictures in iPhoto on your iOS devices and going back back to your Mac looking for the edited photo, but only see the originals. This may be happening because of the resolution of the photos being saved to your iPad or iPhone, see the article linked below.
    iPhoto for iOS (iPad): Edit a photo
    http://support.apple.com/kb/PH11978
    If you edit a photo in the iPhoto Camera Roll album, the edited photo automatically appears the Camera Roll on your iOS device, at the resolution of your device. If you want a full-resolution version of the edited photo sent to the Camera Roll, tap and tap Camera Roll. The full-resolution photo appears in the Camera Roll, and is transferred to your computer when you sync the Camera Roll with your computer.
    Cheers!
    -Jason

  • IPhoto pictures not loading

    When wanting to send a photo or upload (like to facebook and other sites) it to something I get the list down the side, I click Photos then iPhoto but nothing appears.  It says to open iPhoto to see pictures.  iPhoto is open but I cannot upload pictures without dragging them to my desk top!!

    It does show my pictures in Mail.  I used to be able to upload pictures to anything by clicking on photos then iPhoto but it hasn't worked since the update!!

  • Iphoto bar stuck on MAC desktop background

    After I updated to Yosemite the iPhoto bar is on the bottom of my desktop (like a photo). It is unresponsive, it does nothing.

    Hi Camille,
    They've hidden the User's Library in 10.7 & Up...
    While on the Desktop, hold CMD +Option+g, that should open it.
    http://osxdaily.com/2011/07/22/access-user-library-folder-in-os-x-lion/

Maybe you are looking for