Google Nest Hub Max photo frame showing blank screen or not loading images for some

The Google Nest Hub and Nest Hub Max are some of the best devices to have around the house. Not only are they handy for controlling your smart home. But they are also perfect for quickly checking stuff like the current weather, upcoming events or even playing music when your hands are occupied with cooking, for instance. But it is another of their features that excites me the most — the ability to display images stored in your Google Photos account.

Thanks to the large 10-inch display screen, you can easily turn the Google Nest Hub Max into a photo album to display memories of what you have in Google Photos. Let’s just call it the modern-day digital photo frame. But unfortunately, over the past few days, several Nest Hub and Nest Hub Max owners are reporting an issue where the photo frame is showing a blank screen with images not loading at all.

Normally, the Nest Hub should load and display images from Google Photos or Art Gallery, according to your preference. But for some, the photo frame keeps freezing on a single image. For others, the photo won’t completely load, leaving behind a blank white screen. Interestingly, the clock, weather, and album name still appear. And while rebooting the Nest Hub fixes the issue, it comes back after a few days.

Below is an image of the bug as shared by Alex (u/epiccodtion) in the Google Home subreddit.

While we may have just started seeing fresh reports of the Nest Hub not loading images a few days ago, it’s not the first time the issue is happening. Reports in the forum go as far as April 2023. There’s a long thread in the community with over 400 comments about the photo frame freezing on the Google Nest Hub Max.

Google did acknowledge the bug in May and further reiterated in early June that the team was “still on top of this and is currently working on a fix for the next release.” In July, someone said the issue was resolved for them. The forum thread was even marked as resolved. But we are seeing a sudden uptick in reports over the past couple of days. This suggests the issue has resurfaced or it was never resolved.

Google did confirm the issue would be addressed in “next release.” At the time, the big Fuchsia OS update had already started rolling out, so obviously the next release wasn’t about the new OS. All three Nest Hub models are currently on version 12.20230611.1.67 that came out in June, so we can only wait.

Unfortunately, there’s still nothing new from Google to share as I pen this. The most recent acknowledgment is from August, but we’ve contacted Google support for a comment on this issue. We’ll update the article accordingly.

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