iPhoto Rebuild

[gergalicious]

I converted to Mac about 4 years ago and as I stated to my wife then, and still true now, I will 'Never buy another PC again. Ever' Since then we have a 27" iMac, Mac Book, Mac Air (wife's) and several hand held devices.

One mistake I made early on and am paying the price for now was trying to manipulate my iPhoto library. Can't even remember all that I did, but I know better now

Recently I noticed on the iMac that I had all of my events and photos showing within iPhoto, but when I would click one to expand to full size, I would say more than half of them would expand, but then quickly go to a black screen with a triangle / exclamation point showing. I did every repair iPhoto offered to no avail. Reveal in Finder would show no location, or sometimes reference an external hard drive that I don't remember ever using for iPhoto. So, I am on a mission to start fresh with iPhoto and let it do it's thing going forward.

My thoughts were the following:

• Back up iPhoto Package
• Use iPhoto Library Manager to extract photos
• Use duplicate image detector to isolate / remove duplicates (I had many apparently)
• Delete existing iPhoto library and anything else needing deletion (not sure what else?)
• Start iPhoto new using the filtered set of photos from above

One thing I noticed is that the iPhoto package was about 45Gb in size. iPhoto Library Manager extracted photos into the normal Original and Modified folders, but the combination of the two is only about 35Gb in size. Roughly a 10Gb difference.

Also, iPhoto 'says' it has ~22k items within, but I only have 16,450 pictures extracted.

Any thoughts? I was thinking maybe iPhoto counts every item, say the same photo within a created album as well as in an event? Double counting maybe?

Wondering if there are some pics that Library Manager didn't get during its extract process.

Thanks for all comments / suggestions!

I will never fool with the process again

Greg Blakeney
Monroe, LA

 

[flynz4]

If you are going to spend a lot of time trying to reorganize your library... you might want to consider moving to Aperture 3. It is a MUCH more flexible program than iPhoto.

/Jim

 

[gergalicious]

I may consider that, thanks Jim!

One thing I noticed just glancing at the package contents (because the troubled one boggled me) is that there were several alias (what I would have called a shortcut) folder icons in it. The new package has none.

I had a couple in the previous package that had the entire folder structure in place with NO images in any of the folders.

Some had data in only 2011 and 2012 folders, others had 2009 - 2012.

----------

Here is the old structure:

Here is the new: