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Preview does not open JPG photos

After moving some photos to "My Passport for Mac", Preview or any other program cannot open JPG photos and does not provide any information about them.

Also, I tried to rename a file but Preview doesn't let me. How can I access my files?

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 13.2

Posted on Mar 6, 2023 10:39 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Mar 7, 2023 12:07 PM

Apple's Preview universally accepts .jpg, .jpeg, jp2 or their uppercase variants. If you perform a Finder Show info (option+cmd+i) on one of the images that Preview won't open, what does it say about the Kind?


Did you move these images directly from some cloud service to that external drive? For instance, files on Microsoft's OneDrive are encrypted and without the macOS OneDrive application to remove that encryption, you could have images that are encrypted and no Mac application is going to open them.


Hopefully, these are not encoded jpeg xl (*.jxl) images renamed to .jpeg.

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Mar 7, 2023 12:07 PM in response to patroklos12

Apple's Preview universally accepts .jpg, .jpeg, jp2 or their uppercase variants. If you perform a Finder Show info (option+cmd+i) on one of the images that Preview won't open, what does it say about the Kind?


Did you move these images directly from some cloud service to that external drive? For instance, files on Microsoft's OneDrive are encrypted and without the macOS OneDrive application to remove that encryption, you could have images that are encrypted and no Mac application is going to open them.


Hopefully, these are not encoded jpeg xl (*.jxl) images renamed to .jpeg.

Mar 10, 2023 6:24 AM in response to patroklos12

Apple's iCloud does not encrypt images, so a straight drag and drop to your external drive should have not changed the images in route to your external drive. However, if the images were originally on another cloud service that did encrypt them, Apple's iCloud would simply pass along that restriction to your external drive.


Can you open any of these images with Graphic Converter 12, or by clicking once on the image and pressing the space bar to open a Quick Look view? What specific camera make and model took these images?


Do you happen to have the free ExifTool installed, so you can look at the internal image metadata?

Preview does not open JPG photos

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