iPhone's Black Thumbnails

[Tizzo]

I have black thumbnails representing photos in my camera roll. I've tried full restore without result. Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks

[Turboladdade]

I have black thumbnails representing photos in my camera roll. I've tried full restore without result. Anyone have any ideas?

Does this happens with new photos you take?

From the camera roll, try emailing yourself one of the photos themselves (rather than taking a screenshot of the camera roll as it appears on the iPhone). This way you can be sure the image file you receive is correct and rule out the photos being corrupt or the camera taking bad photos.

You can also try out MegaPhone which allows you to browse the file structure of the iPhone. If you do have corrupt photos or a corrupt image thumbnail database of some sort (I assume the iPhone treats images similar to iPhoto on a Mac) then backing up and restoring won't do any good. You'll have to delete all your photos or do the factory restore and start out fresh.

[Tizzo]

The photos themselves are not corrupt; I can e-mail and download all I want. If I do a factory restore will I be able to load all my apps back on? As I recall apps are stored in a backup file.

[Turboladdade]

The photos themselves are not corrupt; I can e-mail and download all I want. If I do a factory restore will I be able to load all my apps back on? As I recall apps are stored in a backup file.

Before you do anything, send yourself all those photos or import them into iPhoto. In a similar manner you'll want to make sure your applications are synced with iTunes (as in, iTunes has a local copy stored in its "Applications" library).

You'll then want to do the factory restore. Because the same corrupt photo library (without working thumbnails) is saved in backups, if you restore your iPhone from a backup it'll just do the same thing over again. So, you won't want to restore from backup in this case, but you will have to reconfigure things like Mail and you'll lose any save text messages or notes. So be sure you manually backup any of this information that you feel you still want in some manner other than iTunes iPhone backup.

After you do the restore, you can bring back the photos from your iPhoto library by having iTunes sync it (as in a fresh sync, not from backup).

[Matteh]

Did you use the default camera app or a different camera app? I got a few of these when I used Camera Genius. What I thought the problem was that I didn't give it enough time to save(not sure if that is the correct problem, but it's what I went with). I had to delete them due to them staying as a black thumbnail. I wish I had tried the emailing trick for them now.