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Confuzzzed

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Aug 7, 2011
1,630
0
Liverpool, UK
Not entirely sure Lion is to blame but in iPhoto we have lost all events information after a manual back up. We back up all photos onto an external hard drive.

Usually we do our backing up using time capsule which works well, but we wanted to do an external drive back up as well to keep at a different site (in case of a fire or a break-in). But in doing so (and this was done by the old fashioned way of dragging and dropping picture files onto the external hard drive) we have lost ALL Events information from our photos.

None of the pictures have gone as such but all our photos now appear as one event with 4,000+ pictures which is clearly a mess to try and replicate. Has anyone else had any experience of this and what should I do? Should I do a restore from Time Capsule or is there a more neat way of restoring my previous information?

We use the latest iPhoto (iLife '11) and Lion (10.7.1).

Can anyone help.
 
When you dragged and dropped the files, did you move or copy the files to the external volume?
 
Copy (as evidenced - I hope - by the little + sign next the bundle I was moving!). Just trying to restore from time machine and it'll take about an hour I am told. Lets hope it works
 
A couple of things may have happened. Perhaps you lost the metadata in the photos during copying; kinda unlikely, but check to see they still have the proper dates.

iPhoto stores photos in its library; if you moved the photos themselves instead of the whole library you would have hopelessly confused it. It's much easier to copy the whole library, then open it by using option-open when starting iPhoto and selecting that library. Or use iPhoto Library Manager.
 
Same problem

I'm having the same problem. I copied the iPhoto library to my hard drive, updated to Lion and copied the library back to iPhoto. The photos are there but all the events are gone. How can I fix this?
 
I'm having the same problem. I copied the iPhoto library to my hard drive, updated to Lion and copied the library back to iPhoto. The photos are there but all the events are gone. How can I fix this?

In the end I had to restore the entire library from a Time machine back up. But it wasn't an easy process because of 'sharing' rights so I suggest you take your machine (and time capsule if you have it) to the nearest Apple store. Ultimately it was my fault because I shouldn't have simply copied the picture files from Finder.
 
Have you also tried holding down CMD ALT whilst launching iPhoto to allow you to rebuild your library? tick all the options when you get to the next pop up screen. This may help (it didn't with me)
 
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