iPhoto deleted my dorm pictures! >:O

[Littleodie914]

Hey guys, I took some pictures yesterday of our dorm room as we were setting up, to send to my girlfriend. I imported them into iPhoto from our digital camera, touched them up a bit, and left them. This morning, I took three more from our finished room, and imported them too. All of a sudden, all of my pictures from yesterday are gone! No idea where they went, and they're gone from my hard drive.

What happened was I tried to drag them from the iPhoto library to a folder on my desktop, so I could open them with preview and reduce their size a bit. When I tried to copy them, it said that it couldn't be completed because some of the items were busy. (They weren't!) Now all the pictures I took look like this:

Any ideas?

 

[CoMpX]

You need to open iPhoto, click on File, click Import to Library, and select the folder on your desktop that you copied your iPhoto Library to.

For future reference, don't mess around with the iPhoto Library folder.

Hmm, this would be a perfect time to use Time Machine.

 

[Chundles]

Hey guys, I took some pictures yesterday of our dorm room as we were setting up, to send to my girlfriend. I imported them into iPhoto from our digital camera, touched them up a bit, and left them. This morning, I took three more from our finished room, and imported them too. All of a sudden, all of my pictures from yesterday are gone! No idea where they went, and they're gone from my hard drive.

What happened was I tried to drag them from the iPhoto library to a folder on my desktop, so I could open them with preview and reduce their size a bit. When I tried to copy them, it said that it couldn't be completed because some of the items were busy. (They weren't!) Now all the pictures I took look like this:

Any ideas?

Never mess with the iPhoto folder. If you want to use Preview, drag the photos to your desktop from within iPhoto - a better way would be to select the photos in iPhoto then use File -> Export and resize them in there. iPhoto is designed so that anything you want to do with your photos you do from within iPhoto - don't touch the original files, there's no need.

 

[Littleodie914]

Actually when I said iPhoto library I was talking about dragging them from inside iPhoto, sorry for any confusion. I can't drag them from the folder on my Desktop back into iPhoto, because it didn't copy them there. It gave me an error about how the photos were busy. Any more ideas?

 

[Littleodie914]

Alright, new and annoying development... In that screenshot above, you see those three pictures at the bottom? I just opened iPhoto after buying books with some friends at the campus store, and all of a sudden those ones are missing too! They show up with those dotted line icons and I can't view them, even though the filenames and dates are still retained. Please help! I'd really like to have those pictures.

 

[Lixivial]

MAKE A BACKUP OF THE iPHOTO LIBRARY FOLDER

There are a few things to check, first go to ~/Photos/iPhoto Library/Data/{year}/{roll #} (don't touch this folder, just look at it)

Things in brackets are bits of information that would apply to you. See if your pictures are there, if they are, you can hold down command-option when opening iPhoto to see if it can rebuild the photo database.

There are a number of options here, such as "Rebuild the photos' small thumbnails," etc. You may want to try the first option, or "Recover oprhaned photos in the iPhoto Library folder," you can theoretically give them all a good go, but that may take a while.

Oh, Apple has a docnum on it. Nifty.

 

[CoMpX]

First, as always, repair permissions, because iPhoto may have become a little confused as to where to find its pictures. You did try a restart first, correct? That would be the first thing to try.

If both of those don't work, then here's a last resort type of thing. In iPhoto, click Photos, then click Revert to Original. It will get rid of any changes you made to your photos, but it will pull the original picture files back up, hopefully restoring your library.

 

[dpaanlka]

What happened was I tried to drag them from the iPhoto library to a folder on my desktop, so I could open them with preview and reduce their size a bit.

Why don't you just do that from within iPhoto.