[nayana]

I am using an iMac 17" G5, OS 10.5.8. For some reason iPhoto has randomly destroyed many of my photos (collected there over the last 5 years). Suddenly a photo opens up in 'edit' as a thumbnail, and the 'revert to original' is greyed out. Eventually the photo opens as a blank, although it can still be viewed in the preview. Anybody know anything? It is not a new problem but I have never found the answer and more and more of my photos are disappearing!

[Thorzdad]

Are the originals still in your Pictures / iPhoto Library folder?

[reader50]

Your drive may have directory corruption, or the iPhoto DB may be corrupted.

Fire up Disk Utility, and have it check the volume your iPhoto Library is on. If it finds anything, let it do repairs. And you might have to restore some lost photos from your Time Machine backup afterwards.

If Disk Utility finds nothing interesting, then launch iPhoto while holding down Command-Option. You'll get a repairs dialog, let it rebuild the iPhoto DB and thumbnails. This will take a long time if you have thousands of pictures. Let it scavenge for lost photos too - they'll end up in a new Recovered folder.

[ibook_steve]

And, of course, you actually do have a Time Machine backup, right?

Steve