Picture Messages Black

[xchris5442x]

Just recently as I am getting picture messages in Hangouts they are showing up Black and or Blank. When I tap the blank photo it get a quick error that simply says cant load imagine. The pictures are sent from iPhones, Note 2's and Note 3s. Some from VZW and some from ATT. Ive cleared the Hangouts Cache and closed the program a few times and I am still having the issue. Has anyone else had this issue? Am I missing a setting on photo size limit?

 

[ptonantryloc]

I've got nothing to help, but my wife had the same issue a couple of days ago. My son sent her several photos in various formats via SMS in Hangouts and they were all black. He sent her the same pictures via email and they were fine. So, not picture problem. We haven't seen the problem since. But, then, we haven't gotten any pictures since then, either.

EDIT: also, we're all on Nexus 5s. So source and destination for the photos was a Nexus 5. My son is on T-Mobile and we're on AT&T.

EDIT 2: Let me modify that. Our son isn't on Google Plus, so our messages through him go SMS or MMS (not a pure Hangouts message). Normally, we use SMS to text him. But, now that I think about it, I don't think a picture can go via SMS. I'll double-check when I can look at the wife's phone. But, I guess it was an MMS message and not SMS. I also just took a picture with the phone and sent it through MMS to the wife, son, and daughter-in-law (all Nexus 5s, the wife and I are on AT&T, the son and daughter-in-law are on T-Mobile). The boy has not yet responded, but everyone else sees the picture fine. I'll have to have him send a picture to us and see if that works now.

EDIT 3: Except for our son's Nexus 5, we can all send and receive photos fine via Hangouts. My son's pictures come across to my wife and I (on AT&T) as black. His wife see's the same photo fine (both on T-Mobile). So, I thought it was a cross-carrier thing. But, the daughter-in-law's photos come across to us fine. I don't know if it's related, but he's the only one of us not on Google Plus.

 

[ptonantryloc]

There's a thread on the Google Product Forums for Hangouts on this:

https://productforums.google.com/d/topic/hangouts/Le8pXujIeNk/discussion

No answer there, though.

EDIT: In case that link doesn't resolve properly, the thread is in the Google Product Forums › Hangouts and called "MMS posting black screen"

 

[patruns]

I'm currently signed out of Hangouts so all message are sent and received via plain old SMS. No issues. I only had issues while signed into Hangouts.

 

[ptonantryloc]

From that thread I referenced, above, this issue is really weird. At least one person there is having the same issue with Textra. She tracked it back to how the sent pictures are named. But, in my case, that doesn't seem to apply since all the phones are using the default camera app with no change to format or name.

My son seems to have semi-solved the issue of his sent photos arriving black by going to his Nexus 5's Settings | Device | Apps | Hangouts and hitting the "Uninstall updates" button to put Hangouts back to its factory default version. Then he went to the Google Play store on the phone and updated Hangouts again. After that, most of his photos went out and arrived fine. But, pointing to the sender's Hangouts software doesn't make sense because many (if not most) of the black pictures in that thread are from people without Hangouts.

As the receiver of black photos, I've done the same as my son. I haven't received any black photos since (or any photos at all), but the old black photos are still black. So, they're either on the phone or embedded in Hangouts wrong. But, still, see the person with Textra having the issue.

It can't be a cross-carrier issue because we see our daughter-in-laws photos fine (T-Mobile to AT&T) while we had (have?) problems with our sons. Ditto for what the accounts are allowed to do.

Heck, I can't even chock it up to data corruption in-transit. It only happened with my son's photos and always happened with his.

 

[xchris5442x]

thanks for info. I seem to have the main issue when its a pure non hangout MMS text from Verizon phones.

 

[ptonantryloc]

Are your black/blank texts from the same people, and conversely, are the texts from those people always black? In that thread, someone suggested that it could be a MMS size limit problem since the various carriers allow different size texts. But, I can't believe that's the issue. Today, we were successfully messaging 2MB photos in both directions across carriers.

 

[xchris5442x]

same threads from different users cause the error. i will delete the thread and test that out. I remember when I had my Note3 briefly i was sending MMS over 1MB on ATT

 

[zrxoa1]

Had same issue not long ago. All pictures texted to me by my son (HTC Windows 8X on Verizon) were blacked out. Lately there has been no problem. Not sure what's going on there...

I'm on ATT gophone plan with my Nexus 5...


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