[kjbee]

OK, I have no idea what happened here. you can read the beginning junk, or skip to the 2nd to last para.

I had a lovely photo I took of some clover as my desktop. I finally decided to go ahead and start using iphoto as my primary photo app (i currently just import them to finder in folders for each date/event), so i was gonna import all my folders (each folder is dated) into the prog. figuring i could tell it to not import duplicates, i just shift-clicked and selected all the folders under import and imported them. well, bad move - it imported them all as ONE roll.

so, ok, that's bad. it appears that it has overwritten the old rolls as well, and now i just have a giant batch of like 2000 pics. so i move those all to the trash. i figure what the hell, i'll just start over - delele the pics in the iphoto modified/originals folders, do a library rebuild. i thought this would find all the pics on the comp and oranize them, but nothing happened.

ok so i figure screw it, i'll lose the red-eye edits i did in iphoto, whatever. so - currently nothing is showing up in iphoto or in the iphoto folders in finder. i manually drag in each folder from finder and it creates a different roll for each folder as i wanted originally.

SO THE PROBLEM: fooling around some more, i added the 'desktop' button to the bottom and clicked on it bc i wasn't sure what it did. well, as you know, it changed my desktop. so weird thing: i CANNOT find the original clover pic any more. i dont remember precisely what folder it was in, but i know it has to be between a few dates (i know when we moved to this house, and i know when i set it as my desktop for a random reason). obviously it was on my comp a few mins ago - it was my desktop. how the hell can i find it?

i decided to check where i store my photos online as well, and noticed that a few are missing from a couple folders in there. what the hell. did i f up iphoto? gr. this is why i didn't want to use it in the first place! finder must be neat!! help please!

[Krusty]

Are you running 10.4 or 10.5 ? Either way, sounds like you just need to do a search in the Finder/Spotlight for what you are looking for. I have a screen grab of such a search:
File kind is "Picture"
Create Date is after 10/29 but before 11/20
Contains the name "Clover" (that's in the search bar ... but even if you don't know the name you can exclude that completely and it will pull up ALL images between certain dates).

Good luck !!

[kjbee]

unfortunately the filename is the date taken and pic #, so that doesn't help much.

I did do a search and came up empty. I even looked thru things in both iphoto and finder and it's not there. Are the images used as desktops etc stored somewhere temp? I know the ones I use from the web are just downloaded to the pics folder...

Also, this search reiterates my annoyance with iphoto keeping dups of everything - i have 3 copies of most photos. gah.

[kjbee]

annnnd ... I also did check com.apple.desktop.plist, and it only lists the current one. Googled that and could only find out how to see the current image name, which I had already figured out how to do.

I mean - if the file was just my desktop, it must be on here somewhere rt? That's what's annoying me! Well, plus I liked the pic.

If only I had Time Machine! More incentive to upgrade once they work out those dock kinks, I guess.

oh - and OS X 10.4.10