[brendan]

Hi,
I've lost all my 2007 photos and I'm trying to track down why and how to recover them. I'd really, REALLY appreciate any help or advice.

I recently upgraded my home wireless system to an airport extreme - plugged in a half terrabit western digital hard drive and everything seemed fine. On the HD is a shared iPhoto library which seemed to work ok on our two computers, both running os x 10.4 and iPhoto 5. I also just got a new powerbook from work which had iPhoto 6 on it; it also played nicely for the first week.
A week ago my girlfriend was editing the photo library to include comments for uploading via Galerie; she says that everything was ok before she went to bed and she closed the computer down - she may have had two computers running off the same library at the same time, but I can't be certain. The next day when I opened iPhoto I found that the entirety of the photos we've taken in 2007 have disappeared, the directory/folder structure in iPhoto is still there, but now the folders are simply empty. We take a LOT of photos between us so this is some loss.

After initial panic, I discovered the 2007 folder in the iPhoto directory proper is empty, but the 'originals' and 'modified' folders DO actually contain our AWOL photos ... sigh of relief. However, I can't for the life of me get them back into iPhoto. I have copied the iPhoto library in its entirety to a new 'temp iPhoto Library' and run the control apple escape command to rebuild the libraries and recover orphan photos to no avail. I have tried manually dragging the photos in as well as importing but I get an error message that the photos are already in the iPhoto directory (I can't tell you how frustrating this is after the Nth thousand time) ....
Is there ANY way to get these 'original' and 'modified' 2007 files back into the iPhoto proper (hopefully with comments and keywords intact) or do I have to rebuild my entire library one photo drag after one photo drag at a time???
Also: any ideas on what caused this godawful mess?? conflicting iphoto versions? two computers sharing the same directory??

thanks in advance!
brendan.

[skybolt]

What probably caused it was that your girlfriend did her work from within the iPhoto library in finder instead of from within the app. Dragging won't help, importing should, but you say that does not do it either. I can't stress enough -- stay out of the iPhoto library in finder! If that's not what she did, then someone else with more knowledge will have to help with that one.

You may want to manually rebuild the library, but I warn you (from experience) that the rebuilt library will have multiple copies of the same photos, etc. There is a lot of work to get back to where you were, but salvaging photos is worth it. The instructions are in Apple's Knowledge Base (unable to look for you just now -- at work). Just search for rebuilding iPhoto. The manual instructions are at the bottom. Follow them exactly.

[zro]

Don't mix different versions of iPhoto on the same photo library.

Can iPhoto 6 load them? If so, upgrade all your machines to that version.

Also, search for other iPhoto libraries. It's possible an empty one was created locally at some point and iPhoto decided (or was told) to use it.

[brendan]

No iPhoto 6 won't load them - its the computer I'm using to try to recover them. No local libraries. The photos are still there in the 'originals' and 'modified' folders, I just can't get iPhoto to show them.

re:

"Don't mix different versions of iPhoto on the same photo library."

-> I didn't I mixed two versions of iPhoto on the same library. Is this wrong? Why? Isn't this in Mac's interest? If they're pushing home networking and at the same time pushing their new hardware there's always going to be the possibility of a new machine (with a new version of preinstalled software) showing up on a home network. It seems pretty silly if the system breaks each time a new computer is added to it!

[brendan]

Originally Posted by skybolt 

What probably caused it was that your girlfriend did her work from within the iPhoto library in finder instead of from within the app. I can't stress enough -- stay out of the iPhoto library in finder! If that's not what she did, then someone else with more knowledge will have to help with that one.

she definately didn't ... I doubt she even know one exists ... especially on a mounted volume over a wireless network

Originally Posted by skybolt 

You may want to manually rebuild the library, but I warn you (from experience) that the rebuilt library will have multiple copies of the same photos, etc. There is a lot of work to get back to where you were, but salvaging photos is worth it.

Thanks, sounds painful, but I'll have a look
ta

[rarebird]

Hi Brendan

I've just experienced the very same problem. The folder 2007 missing but the actual data still in the Library folder and nothing shows when I open iPhoto. I also had the experience a few days after installing wireless Airport Express. Just wondering if you have found a cure/solution.

Best Regards

Rarebird

[rarebird]

After posting my headache everything seems solved. All I did was make a back up of the whole library to an external drive and then load the latest version of "iPhoto Library Manager" and have it reopen iPhoto in it's new position. All pictures opened and look as they did before ... Handy little programme .. No thanks to Apple it seems.

Best of luck

rareBird