How can I fix if iMovie is stuck on the first photo?

Still have no answers here, I just started yet another video and having same issue. The ONLY way I can make a video it to literally edit an older video I have saved and act like its a new video, which is beyond not optimal.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Hi,

In another thread on this forum, inserting a short video in the timeline cured an issue with transitions not appearing. You might try that to see if it shakes things loose with your freezing issue. It seems that the updates to iOS 18.2 and 18.3 caused some performance issues, and the freezing issue that you mention with photos may be one of them. Anyway, try inserting a short video and see what happens.

-- Rich

This is happening to me to and 300 people are waiting for my parents 70th anniversary video and the party is tomorrow, what is the solution? I'm freaking furious right now. Just hung up with an idiot from Apple who did NOT now what he was doing and it took 30 mins for him to say "Geez, I'm stumped."

I've never had this issue before. The video sticks and will NOT go past the first image. Please help! My parents are 90 and celebrating their 70th anniversary tomorrow. Geez!

Same! Did you get a resolve? I’m trying to edit an iMovie I made back in Oct for my parents 50th anniversary. My mom passed away a few days ago so I’m making an In Memoriam video by basically doctoring the 50th video. It won’t move past the first photo.

I got no resolve. I've done three calls in a week. Each rep says its been a known issue, and each rep told me essentially that this either will NOT get fixed, or, if it does, it will be 6 months.

Each was nice and said the best way to expedite -- for Apple to even LOOK INTO the issue -- would be if they had enough complaints. So please, everyone reading this should open a ticket.

The alternatives are disgusting but in a pinch, if you have to make a movie, you can do these things:

1 - overwrite an older movie you have in iMovie before this change happened. You'll see if you begin to edit certain saved videos in IMovie, it WILL work. But honestly, how ridiculous.

2 - The preview is the main issue, so one rep told me it IS saving it, but you have to save the file, email it yourself, and then watch it in files, etc, to see the preview and make edits from there.

This is all so ridiculous, I don't get it. But everyone should call and lodge a complain to get it going.

Lastly, on my end, I've seen that if you make your very first image in iMovie a video clip, it seems to push it to make you see the preview.

I'm glad everyone is adding comments, and not sure what else we can do except make it a news story? Many of us rely on iMovie for our livelihood and now to not have such a major operational/design/UI glitch with no news from Apple is actually newsworthy to me.

Let's all keep following this and I urge anyone reading this to call Apple and lodge a complaint. It's not going to fix itself if no one except me calls!

Thanks!

Jenny

Did you ever get an answer? I’ve made 100 videos on my iPad with iMovie but now it’s freezing up on the first picture and the only apple support I get is to make sure everything is updated.

And this is new iPhone 16 Pro and did the IOS 18.3 software update a week ago. I do iMovie on my phone, not my laptop.

I was having the same problem of first picture stuck on imovie created with imagic video. Adding a short video or even panoramic shots to the movie solved the problem.

Yes, if you. Remove the video the preview.will get stuck again. You need to leave the video in the time line until you finish your editing. Then delete the video and export the project. It will play fine.

-- Rich

Delete the preferences (settings).

Hold down the Option and Command keys as you launch iMovie until a window appears.

Click on the Delete button.

And me.

No, because that's for laptop. This is happening on iMovie on iPhone 16, that is not an option.

Mine is doing the same thing. Did anybody find a fix?

Thank you for the suggestion of inserting a short video. It worked. You saved the day 👍👍👏🏻👏🏻

Same here. I inserted a video onto the timeline and that “unstuck” the first photo. But as soon as I removed the video, the first photo became stuck again. Annoying.