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Help! Lost iPhoto photographs and blank library


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Help! Lost iPhoto photographs and blank library
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dhsu800
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Join Date: Aug 2005
 
2005-08-06, 10:30

I have a long and tortured history with iPhoto 2.0, and my iPhoto library seems to be corrupted in some way. Key question: Is there anyway to recover my most recent photographs?

Let me explain how I arrived at this point. The original hard drive in my PowerBook G4 550 Mhz was to small to store all of my photographs, and so I moved my photo library folders to an external hard drive. After getting a new hard drive, I moved the iPhoto library back to my computer.

Crucially, the really weird thing is that when I moved the library back to my computer, my new photographs from 2005 were never written to a new folder in the iPhoto library, though I could view them within iPhoto.

The loss of photographs was caused by a recent vacation that filled up iPhoto again, and slowed it to a crawl. I installed iPhoto Buddy, a launching utility that was intended to split up the library, and using this immediately caused iPhoto to lose all of my albums and photos within the program.

Because I never had a 2005 folder for iPhoto, all of my most recent photographs now seem to be lost. Or are they? Is there anyway to rebuild the iPhoto library, or to recover the location of the actual photographs on my hard drive.

Key information: I have already tried rebuilding the library in iPhoto 2.0, but still have no photos at all. As a (late) precaution, I also copied the iPhoto library to another drive, and it seems to have trouble obtaining permissions to copy files.

Previous threads: I have also read some of the advice given in a previous thread, "Lost" my iPhoto library (http://forums.applenova.com//showthread.php?t=8036), but didn't find it applicable to this situation (please correct me if I'm wrong).

Options I'm Considering: Because of the problems in copying the remaining pictures (somewhat after the fact), I am thinking about repairing the disk permissions using Cocktail or Disk Utility. Because of the mysterious (and annoying) ways that iPhoto works, I am thinking about upgrading to 5.0 and just hoping that the photos appear (weird, I'm desperate).
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alcimedes
I shot the sherrif.
 
Join Date: May 2004
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2005-08-06, 11:45

So I'm assuming that you iPhoto library folder is still apprpox. the right size?
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dhsu800
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Join Date: Aug 2005
 
2005-08-06, 11:49

No, sadly the iPhoto library now only appears to be 4 KB.

The folders for all of my photographs from 2002-2004 are the correct sizes, but the folder for 2005 only has one photograph. If iPhoto had ever written the most recent photographs correctly to a folder, I suspect that it would have about 4 GB of photos.
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alcimedes
I shot the sherrif.
 
Join Date: May 2004
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2005-08-06, 13:11

If the folder size is only 4kb, then the photos aren't in there, regardless of what you try to do with it. They might be somewhere else though. Have you done a search for files that end in .jpg and have a creation date in 2005? might be your best bet at finding out where they could be, if they're on your machine somewhere.

Google is your frenemy.
Caveat Emptor - Latin for tough titty
I tend to interpret things in the way that's most hilarious to me
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dhsu800
New Member
 
Join Date: Aug 2005
 
2005-08-06, 13:17

Alcimedes, thanks for the speedy response. I've tried the following searches:

- .jpg and other formats (by using general 'images');
- Filenames of folders (i.e., 2005) and also the filenames that I was busy giving to the photos;
- For all files created in the last month (got back from vacation two weeks ago), as well as the exact creation date of the pictures themselves.

So far, no dice.
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alcimedes
I shot the sherrif.
 
Join Date: May 2004
Send a message via ICQ to alcimedes  
2005-08-06, 14:00

Are you sure they were on your computer at some point? If so (and then they were deleted) the best/only way I've found to restore deleted files under OSX is through a program called Data Rescue X

I tested out close to a dozen apps. in OSX that are supposed to restore delted files, but this was the only one that didn't have to be installed beforehand to still work. You might want to give it a try, depending on what the photos are worth to you. Otherwise it sounds like they've been deleted plain and simple.

Google is your frenemy.
Caveat Emptor - Latin for tough titty
I tend to interpret things in the way that's most hilarious to me
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dhsu800
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Join Date: Aug 2005
 
2005-08-06, 15:46

CONCLUSION:

My photos have been recovered!

The conclusion of this affair also makes me feel better about my initial suspicions, though it required the generous help of one of my co-workers to solve the problem.

He used a German utility called Tree Size Carbon to look through the hard drive directory, and found a hefty folder (6 GB's) that wasn't showing up in the Finder. The photographs were buried in a sub-folder of the iPhoto library, titled "Firewire Drive", which makes me think that it somehow is the legacy of my past hard drive swap. After finding the images, he used the Unix terminal commands in Terminal to copy the images out of the folder to a new folder on the desktop called "recover". The command:

cp -rf * source target

Anyway, thanks for all of your help.
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nancy_johnson
 
 
2010-06-26, 05:40

Well, the same case has happened with me few days ago and I am also unable to recover my digital photos from the iPhoto Library. Then I followed these steps to get it back –
  • First open the hard drive and locate your picture folder where photos are stored.
  • You will see an iPhoto icon on the ‘Media Menu’, so just right-click on it and then click on the option “show package contents”, which will show you the structure of iPhoto.
  • Now your images are either in one of the two folders which is named as “Original” and “Modified”.
  • Now, to access the contents of the folder, just right-click on the folder you want the picture of and then click “Make Alias” to create the shortcut of the folder at the designated location.

All the best!
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