why are image thumbnails not displaying in finder since updating to sequoia on my m1 MacBook pro

I’ve read most of these posts. Everyone is talking about the recent upgrade/update to Sequoia. My 2015 MacBook is running on Monterey 12.7.6, but in the last week or so, the thumbnail images disappeared. So, what would cause that when I haven’t had any updates? I’ve tried JPG, TIF, PSD, nothing works.

Another odd twist ...

I noticed that a Finder image icon disappeared after I rotated an image using a Quick Action. Strangely, increasing the size of the icon in the window displayed the image while restoring its original size removed it. Subsequent rotations restored the icon.

- Pie Lover

I have a brand new MBP M4 MAX 128GB collected 11 Dec. It's running Sequoia 15.2. My previous MBP M2 MAX had randomly missing thumbnails. The old MBP was transferred across by USBc 3.0 cable to the new MBP on same day.

On 23 Dec I took a session of photos on my iPhone 16 Pro Max. Uploaded them to my target folder 'Camera Uploads'. Some thumbnails created others not (see screenshot 1). Weird. If I double click on the missing thumbnail then a preview of the image shows (see screenshot 2). When I close the preview the thumbnail remains blank.

I have tried deleting various running tasks in Activity Monitor and rebooting. Makes no difference. Tried deleting various cache files (as advised by claude.ai). Makes no difference. Had a session with Apple Chat Support. He had fewer suggestions than claude.ai Waste of time. By the way one suggestion he gave was to reinstall the OS. I'm sure that isn't going to make any difference but it would open up the possibility of losing data and/or having to reinstall applications.

I downloaded Lenscape a third party app from the App Store. Interesting that the missing thumbnails were missing in Lenscape as well.

My conclusion is it has to be an issue with the OS code. And that Apple has failed to fix it. Or has not prioritised it for fixing. But how can you kick a behemoth into action?

If you are a photographer, graphic designer or similar this issue is a real and very major problem for you preventing you from scanning images for selection purposes.

The indexing suggestion is IMHO hogwash. It's not the root cause of the problem.

Canon RAW is a red herring. Sequoia fails to show thumbnails randomly irrespective of camera type. My thumbnails fail from Nikon and from my Apple iPhone 16 Pro Max 1Tb. The issue is definitely in the importing process. See screenshot which shows images uploaded at the same time from my iP{hone 16 with all images photographed during the same session (when looking at Christmas house light decorations).

If you access the blank thumbnail and rotate it through 360 degrees it solves the problem but doing that for large numbers of blank thumbnails is out of the question. That suggests the code works but randomly fails when importing.

Apple Support pull your finger out and get this resolved.

Canon RAW is a red herring. Sequoia fails to show thumbnails randomly irrespective of camera type. My thumbnails fail from Nikon and from my Apple iPhone 16 Pro Max 1Tb. The issue is definitely in the importing process. See screenshot which shows images uploaded at the same time from my iP{hone 16 with all images photographed during the same session (when looking at Christmas house light decorations).

If you access the blank thumbnail and rotate it through 360 degrees it solves the problem but doing that for large numbers of blank thumbnails is out of the question. That suggests the code works but randomly fails when importing.

Tried this. Not a solution that worked for me.

Also seconding this. Recently upgraded to Sequoia 15.2 and now Finder is unable to show thumbnail images for PNG files. JPG and every other format seem to be okay, but for some reason no thumbs on PNG files.

I deleted everything in my ~/Library/Caches/ folder; re-indexed all my drives, restarted. If I do the 'Convert Image' to JPG in the Preview pane, that works... but that's because the Finder creates a new JPG file and the PNG remains the same.

Are there different PNG 'formats'? Other info that might be noteworthy: If I bring the PNG into Photoshop and export it to PNG (both 'Quick Export' and through the 'Export As' dialogue box), then the image's thumbnail appears. However, if I bring the PNG into Photoshop and simply save it as I close it, then there is no thumbnail image.

Thank you.

iMac Pro 2017

2.5 GHZ 14-Core Intel Xeon W

Radeon Pro Vega 64 16 GB

64 GB 2666 MHZ DDR4 RAM

Sequoia 15.2

Removing plist does not work

I also noticed the icon resizing workaround. BTW, Automator has a built-in Action to change the icon size in Folder Views (see below). This can be used in an Automator workflow to change multiple (or even all) folders.

- Pie Lover

Interesting. For myself, it's only PNG files that have a generic thumbnail image, whether they're on my local hard drive or on an external drive.

Don't do this with a PSD file, it will merge all the layers. Luckily I have a backup of the file.

Still a problem with 15.3.2.

Some jpg, png, tiff, HEIC, DNG and CR2 files randomly reappear, some not.

Same here - jpegs and pngs. What I've tried is opening the image in Photoshop and then saving it as a copy. The new version shows the preview icon and then I delete the one that doesn't. It's not ideal but it seems to work and all of the metadata is preserved.