iPhoto+Lightroom= Photos Gone!

[wawanarchist]

So I shot a movie last week, and I imported all of my photos into iPhoto. Last night I got Lightroom. I dragged and dropped my photos into it and had it keep them in the same folder rather than copy them. I did the edits, hit export, and told it to overwrite the originals. I turned off the display on my imac and went to sleep.

Today I wake up, ready to send the proofs to the director, to find that my photos are gone! The folder in the iPhoto package is missing, and in iphoto a ! sign pops up instead of my photo.

I searched everywhere, they are not in the trash, not in any other folder, and spotlight can't find them

I did not have a backup, as I assumed a 2 week old imac would be a safe enough place. I don't need a lecture on it at this point, but some help in finding my images would be very nice...

 

[swiftaw]

Does Lightroom see the images?

 

[wawanarchist]

Does Lightroom see the images?

It shows the thumbnails, but when I enlarge them, it just blows up the pixely thumbnail, and says IMG_XXXXX Cannot be found

 

[swiftaw]

I guess I'm a little confused as to what iPhoto has to do with anything if you were using Lightroom.

If you can give a detailed step by step of what you did from downloading from the camera to finding they were gone I may be able to identify the problem.

 

[wawanarchist]

I guess I'm a little confused as to what iPhoto has to do with anything if you were using Lightroom.

If you can give a detailed step by step of what you did from downloading from the camera to finding they were gone I may be able to identify the problem.

I plugged in my camera. iPhoto pops up, asks if I want to import. Being new to mac, I decided to let iPhoto handle all of my photo sorting since I figured it would work fine. After a week of importing photos like this, I got Lightroom.

To get the photos into Lightroom, I would select an 'event' from iPhoto and drag and drop it into Lightroom

Lightroom would ask if I wanted to copy the photos to another folder, or just leave them where they were. I chose to leave them where they were

Then I went along my Lightroom business, until I worked on all of my photos.

I clicked on 'export' where it asked where I wanted the photos to go (i chose original folder)

Asked what to do about overwriting old photos. I told it to overwrite without asking, figuring they would keep the same file name, then iPhoto would read them as if nothing happened.

Now everything is gone, folder, pictures, everything except for the thumbnails, which are stored in the 'data' folder of the iPhoto packet

 

[swiftaw]

iphoto 08?

Ok, do the following.

Navigate to ~/Pictures/

Right click on iPhoto Library and select 'Show Package Contents'

See if you can find the files in there

 

[wawanarchist]

iphoto 08?

Ok, do the following.

Navigate to ~/Pictures/

Right click on iPhoto Library and select 'Show Package Contents'

See if you can find the files in there

Already tried that. Thats how I found out the folder is completely missing, thanks for the suggestion though

 

[swiftaw]

Already tried that. Thats how I found out the folder is completely missing, thanks for the suggestion though

Hmm, it's a strange problem. Files shouldn't just vanish.