Ghost images in Preview while editing AirDrop iPhone photos

OK, so they these things to narrow things down, maybe:

• Restart the computer (of course)
• Re-start in Safe Mode. This bypasses certain potentially disruptive processes, and it often helps. Safe Mode is different for different computers, so see this: 

           Start up your Mac in safe mode - Apple Support 

• Make a new user and see if the same problem recurs with it.

The idea is to find out if the problem is with your account, or with caches and login items, and stuff like that. One of these steps may fix the problem, but their failure to work also helps figure out what's happening.

Let us know what happens…

OK, I see the same issue which seems to be a bug how Preview.app displays edits with new .heic shot with iPhone 16 Pro and iOS 18.4.1:

If I crop such image, then all loaded .heic and .jpg images after that display an overlaid ghost of it. If I crop some later such new .heic, then its ghost is overlaid on top of later images. But if I re-open those images, then the ghost image is no longer overlaid on other images so it seems to be a bug how Preview.app caches such cropped image.

On the other hand, I can not replicate that with an older .heic shot with iPhone 12 mini iOS 18.5 so something with the new style .heic triggers that bug. iOS 18 introduced some new flavors to .heic and it seems some mobile devices like iPhone 16 Pro also add their own extra features.

While a "thumb drive" works well, you don't need in involve an extra device. You can just put some pictures in a folder in the "Users" folder-- that folder is accessible to every user. You can see here that I have a Photos Library or 2 available to all users:

Since this doesn't seem to be connected to the User, then it has to be one of the things that didn't change-- that seems like either Preview, macOS, or the Mac, itself-- even though those are all the same for me. Does this same problem occur when you open those pictures in the Photos app?

In Preview, I understand that the overlap occurs only when you have the pictures in the same window, is that right? Also, it is affected by the "Reduce Transparency" setting. And this doesn't happen for me. It is true, but surely irrelevant, that Reduce Transparency causes weird stuff on iOS and iPadOS, but only in dark setting. In any case-- change your dark/light setting and see if makes any change. Grasping at straws…

It's a puzzle! Maybe Matti has an idea…

I get nothing like that. I used HEIC, jpg, and tiff files. Of course, the file type doesn't matter once it's interpreted by Preview and on the screen.

You wouldn't have a transparency set funny in Accessibility, would you? If not, try "Reduce Transparency."

I'm running out of ideas. But it must be fixable since I don't see it.

donald mc wrote:… Chances of Apple fixing this? Probably Zero.

On the contrary, we have seen fixes to things that were brought up here. But the Apple folks don't go plowing through here looking for things to fix. So, to let them know, go to them:

Feedback - Photos - Apple

It won't be fast, of course, and you won't get a response.

This has been happening for years! How frustrating! I've never noticed this. And, while I don't do much editing with Preview, I just dragged a folder to Preview and quickly edited some pictures, and I didn't see any ghost images. I was just messing around-- I adjusted saturation, contrast, shadows-- pretty much all the sliders. I didn't save my pictures. Do you have to save for the ghost images to show? Can you think of anything that we're doing differently? How can I re-create the problem?

donald mc wrote:

I created a new user. I could not find a way to airdrop or send pictures to this user, who really has no identity, no email, just a user of the same machine. Advice?

The easiest way is to copy some images to a thumb drive and use that "sneakernet".

I couldn't replicate the issue. Can you provide exact workflow how to replicate it?

p.s. Preview does have some old bugs --- for example in batch mode it exports some images in the wrong codec so many exported .tif images as .jpeg are, in fact, still TIFF so so other apps have trouble processing them, and of course they are larger.