I had to make it the default WebP file type viewer first, and then the icon thumbnails showed up on the desktop.
View attachment 2105072
This worked for me after I also followed your lead and in Finder set my Pictures folder to View as Icons instead of Columns.
That was the most straightforward activity that I've done with my 2011 15" MBP in the past 48 hours! After postal strikes/delays and dispatch delays, I received all of the RAM that I'd purchased to upgrade the machine from the stock 4GB to 12GB RAM.
From one seller I purchased an 8GB module and 4GB from another. As you can see, the latter sent what I think was erroneously, 2X 4GB modules instead of one - and this would later prove to be quite fortuitous. I shut down the computer, disconnected everything and removed the bottom plate so that I could swap the RAM.
Nice and easy but when I powered up the MBP this is where the problems began. High Sierra wouldn't start. The progress bar took ages to update and eventually hung at 100% and would remain so for hours. The usual troubleshooting measures of resetting the SMC and NVRAM made no difference and on subsequent attempts to boot High Sierra it stalled at the 50% mark.
Great.
I also have Snow Leopard on a dual boot and that booted fine - and was lightning fast with 12GB ram installed! At least this signalled to me that it was a software problem - not a hardware one. Next, I booted the recovery partition and ran Disk Utility and it didn't report any issues. High Sierra still wouldn't boot so I returned to Snow Leopard and decided to use the environment to back up important files from the High Sierra partition onto an external USB drive.
SuperDuper! to the rescue - actually, no. It reached sixty odd GB of data out of 610GB and then stopped after failing to copy a jpg file. I tried to find the Snow Leopard compatible version of Carbon Copy Cloner but had no joy on that front. Ordinarily at this stage I would've used Target Disk Mode to clone the data using another Mac so that even if the installation isn't bootable, I could reformat the High Sierra partition, reinstall the OS and then restore all my data and programs with Migration Assistant. If I could locate my FireWire 800 to 800 or 800 to 400 cables, that is.
Panic is starting to set in because I'm worrying for the fate of the data on the High Sierra partition, which I foolishly hadn't backed up anywhere lately despite its value to me. It was here that I did the most obvious thing and manually copied the relevant folders to the external drive and strangely this worked whereas SuperDuper! had failed. At least my data was now safe in case the partition later became inaccessible, which was a major relief.
After some research I learned that the reinstall macOS option from the recovery partition will repair your installation whilst preserving your data and programs, so I gave it a try.
This looks promising:
As we all know, "About 45 minutes remaining" could actually mean
450 minutes so I went out for a few hours and when I returned, this is what was waiting for me:
Yes! The log-in screen for my account. Thank goodness. I logged in and everything was present and waiting for me. There were a few settings which I had to reconfigure within System Preferences but I was returned right back to my open Finder windows prior to this crisis. PurgeWrangler will need to be re-enabled and the System Integrity Protection disabled for eGPU usage but that's a minor issue which is easily solved.
You're probably wondering why the RAM information is now 8GB instead of 12. It seems that the 8GB module is bad - because when I shut down Snow Leopard, the computer emitted three beeps in a row and during my initial High Session, the graphics became corrupted after a couple of minutes, the computer froze, the display went black and I again heard three beeps in row followed by an automatic shutdown.
I removed the 8GB module, retained the 1x 4GB RAM and installed the other 4GB module and they're working great. There's been no beeping so it's definitely the 8GB one - and I made a point of checking that it had been correctly seated. I'll have to contact the seller and inform them that it's faulty. That is unless you think it's worth checking with something like MEMTEST. Personally I doubt it but I'm open to suggestions just in case.
Nonetheless, for the meantime 8GB still makes a huge difference over the original stock config and I no longer see the machine struggling with 256MB RAM remaining!
Two important lessons for me from this episode - take backing up far more seriously and always know where your FireWire cables are located.
