[ctbritt]

OK. I'm at a complete loss here. I know there are several threads here about getting your iPhoto library reindexed by spotlight but nothing seems to work for me. Here's my problem: A few days ago, suddenly Spotlight stopped finding my photos in iPhoto on my Hard Drive (HD) I could do search like, "Baghdad kind:image" and nothing would come back. At all, even though I have many, many photos with the keyword or comment or title of "Baghdad" something or other..

So I have done the following:

• Deleted iphoto.ipspot
• added dummy keywords, reindexed, then deleted dummy keywords, reindexed.
• used Spotlightindexer to index just my iPhoto Library folder.
• Forced an entire reindexing of my hard drive
• Used iPhoto Library Manager to duplicate my iPhoto library to my LaCie hard drive (LaCie). (by the way, once I did that, I was able to find all my photos by comments, keywords, etc., from LaCie, but still nothing on HD)
• Copied newly rebuilt iPhoto library back to HD... Still no love, but can still find photos on LaCie now.

Further muddying the waters, just to see if it was working correctly, I put the Rebuilt Library on LaCie in the privacy tab to not be indexed. No photos showed up. OK. That was to be expected. But when I removed that Rebuilt Library from the privacy tab, the photos on the LaCie are nonexistent, as far as Spotlight is concerned. It's like once you put something in the privacy tab, it's gone forever!

I'm at a complete loss here. I really don't want to have to reimport EVERYTHING and lose my keywords, captions, etc., but i can't find a way to fix this. I wonder if my importer for iPhoto in /System/Library/Spotlight/iPhoto.mdimporter is corrupt.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this, please?

[ctbritt]

OK. I'm getting warmer. I found that if I change something in a photo's title -- not the comments or keywords -- spotlight will then find it. But I don't want to wipe out my old titles, I just want to add a character or number at the end. Any applescript gurus know how to do this? Ideally, it would take the existing title, add "x" (or whatever) to the end of all my 2,745 photos, close iPhoto, relaunch it and then take off the "x", restoring the title to its former glory. Any suggestions?

thanks,

[jamil5454]

Automator should be able to do that.

[ctbritt]

Well, I may have spoken too soon. Changing the title of the photo only worked with two of the ones I changed. I don't know what the heck is going on. And poking around in Automator doesn't seem to allow for batch renaming... iPhoto's built-in batch rename function is too destructive.

[Goldfinger]

Originally Posted by ctbritt

Well, I may have spoken too soon. Changing the title of the photo only worked with two of the ones I changed. I don't know what the heck is going on. And poking around in Automator doesn't seem to allow for batch renaming... iPhoto's built-in batch rename function is too destructive.

Automator absolutely allows batch renaming. I did it once (adding a few characters to a title).

[ctbritt]

really? How did you do it? I was never able to figure out how. It's a bit of an academic exercise at this point as I finally got my index rebuilt correctly and it's working fine now.