iPhoto showing Grey boxes where Photos should be

[jacobj]

My library in iPhoto is currently hanging all the time and showing grey boxes in place of the photos. This has now been going on for about a month and seems to be getting worse all the time.

It started when some files that were in trash began re-showing themselves as being in the library but as the grey boxes. I re-deleted them and then could not delete them from the Trash. After several attempts it seemed to work, but now I have grey boxes everywhere.

My machine has also crashed and required a re-build in that time and I just moved the iPhoto libary folder over to the new machine.

I am beginning to think that I have a corrupted library folder and am therefore going to have to manually pull out the contents off all the folders and move them to another folder..

I think that the quickest way of doing this is to do a photo search for photos of size greater than 500K (therefore excluding thumbs), selecting the lot and moving them to a temporary folder. Deleting the iPhoto library folder and then re-import them into iPhoto...

I could wait until I get my MBP to do this as I am sure that it would be much quicker, but I really do want a clean build to move over and not a corrupted library.

Any thoughts before I rush in?

 

[wwooden]

If you hold the option key down while iPhoto is starting, it gives you the option to find your iPhoto library. If you do this and find your iPhoto library folder, it might rebuild the library and fix it.

Quick info, I don't know if you have or not, but you should never do anything to the pictures in the iPhoto library folder outside of the iPhoto, it will really screw things up. Don't go in there and move things around, don't delete them, do all that if you need from within iPhoto. Think of iPhoto like iTunes, you wouldn't do a search through your music folder for a particular song, you would use iTunes to find it. Think of iPhoto the same way, it's a fancy photo organizer.

 

[jacobj]

If you hold the option key down while iPhoto is starting, it gives you the option to find your iPhoto library. If you do this and find your iPhoto library folder, it might rebuild the library and fix it.

Quick info, I don't know if you have or not, but you should never do anything to the pictures in the iPhoto library folder outside of the iPhoto, it will really screw things up. Don't go in there and move things around, don't delete them, do all that if you need from within iPhoto. Think of iPhoto like iTunes, you wouldn't do a search through your music folder for a particular song, you would use iTunes to find it. Think of iPhoto the same way, it's a fancy photo organizer.

I didn't know this. It is the solution to my age old problem of wanting more than 1 library. I take about 5000 photos a year and would like a different library for each year. I am using this little trick to create them now.

Thank you very much.