OSX Preview “Waiting for Scanner…”

I recently ran into the dreaded “waiting for scanner” Mac Preview nonsense, where it essentially got stuck trying to scan a document.

The fix was rather trivial once someone figured out what process to kill:

$ ps -A|grep Image

  601 ... /System/Library/Image Capture/Support/icdd
  705 ... /System/Library/Image Capture/Support/Image Capture Extension.app/Contents/MacOS/Image Capture Extension
... other stuff

$ kill 705

The hilarious part, though, was to read the original post and compare the uselessness of the “human bot” who completely failed to understand what was going on (despite the fact that, in theory, this person should have been somewhat “trained” to within this very area of expertise) and instead just spouted out inane pre-digested blurbs.

It is obvious that the Tech Support person would not pass the Turing test: if I’ve ever seen a job ripe for being handed over to our AI overlords, this is definitely one!

6 responses to “OSX Preview “Waiting for Scanner…””

Ren

May 12, 2016 at 9:48 am

Thanks. Very helpful. Solved the problem, after renumbering the Scanners IP-Address.

Reply
Jim Laskowski

September 8, 2016 at 12:39 am

Kill the session and then what? I killed the session then tried to open the scanner and it still says, “Waiting for Scanner…”

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1. massenz
  
  February 7, 2017 at 8:10 am
  
  ummm “session”? you have to kill the process using the `kill` command and the Process ID (PID) – the number that is shown by `ps`.
  
  I guess, if it still says “waiting for scanner” rinse and repeat, or maybe the problem is something else.
  
  Oh – BTW: a bit of politeness never hurts when asking question to someone who is giving you advice for free. But whatever, I guess…
  
  Reply
Niels

January 3, 2017 at 9:00 pm

This worked like a charm. Thank you.
An even easier solution is to just type:

killall “Image Capture Extension”

No need for grep first 🙂

Reply
BigBird

October 5, 2017 at 4:20 am

Big ups all around….this problem has been plaguing me for 3 years. Eventually goes away but comes back.
Killing the process worked.

Thanks!

Reply
ideagonalwp

August 27, 2019 at 4:51 pm

Thank you! This error has been pesting me for a long time, I was even looking for alternative software, although I like the simplicity of Image Capture.

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