iPhoto displays exclamation mark instead of photo

May 10, 2008 at 7:58 pm | In Mac OS X | 6 Comments
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Has iPhoto ever surprised you by displaying a giant exclamation mark instead of your photo? I had this experience after importing and cropping several photos today. The thumbnails appeared just fine, but when I double-clicked on one of the cropped photos I got a giant exclamation mark where my photo should have been!

I first tried rebuilding the iPhoto database (see iPhoto 4 or later: Rebuilding the iPhoto Library), but that didn’t help. Then I came across this document on Apple Support: iPhoto 6: Image appears when browsing but is blank or exclamation mark when editing. Apparently, the exclamation mark indicates that iPhoto is unable to find the file for the photo. My splitting, merging, and renaming of events (perhaps because at one point I had two events with the same name?) must have caused iPhoto to lose track of the cropped images.

Fortunately, selecting the photos’ thumbnails and then choosing “Revert to Original” from the “Photos” menu restored the photos. I then just had to re-crop them.

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  1. Thanks.
    I had the same issue. ‘Revert to Original’ did the trick. It was having the iPhoto exclamation mark issue with all the photos in one event that were in a vertical (portrait) orientation… photos freshly downloaded from my camera. Strange. Others downloaded at the same time, but in different events, were ok.

    -TD

    • hi im having this problem with multiple files since i have used find duplicate files on my iphoto library, basically i had many duplicates and FDF did a good job of finding them and removing them, unfortunately it has left me with lots of thumbnails that show the dreaded ! mark when i try and actually show the picture full screen. I could use revert to original but it may be a task i had to pass onto my children given i have over 2000 missing pictures. Is there not a way of asking iphoto to intelligently fix the links as I know where all of the original files are I just dont want to reinstate all of the duplicates ?

  2. Awesome! I was a little worried when I started seeing this mysterious exclamation point, but ‘Revert to Original’ fixed it. Thanks!

  3. Hey,

    I have the exact same problem only I cannot use the Revert to Original as it’s not highlighted. Any suggestions?

    Any help would be great appreciated!!

  4. Thanks. This worked great. I appreciate you letting others know how to relieve the panic .!

    • I’m having the same problem and the Revert to Original command is grayed out. Any Ideas?


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