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iPhoto Sucks
- Thread starter Declan
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Declan said:
If you don't mind me asking, why did you restart two minutes later? Did the pictures show up on the iPhoto window after importing? Did you actually see the pictures import and the status bar move across the bottom of iPhoto windown?
How did you disconnect the camera? I know with mine if you just unplug the camera it says data could be lost, etc and it should be ejected by dragging the icon of the camera media to the trash to eject...but I don't think that would have caused this problem.
Any more info you give us would be helpful...exact steps you went through to import, why restart, etc.
Johnny
Is your "library" empty or are your "albums" empty? When you import the photos, they are stored in the library. You then create albums and drag photos into them. Sorry if this sounds remedial.
Also, did you by chance change the name of the library under
/users/pictures/? iPhoto is funky and will only understand "iPhoto Library" unless you have downloaded iPhoto Library Manager (which allows for the creation and navigation of multiple libraries).
You can download it here
One thing I never ever do is transfer photos directly from the camera to my system. I have always used an external firewire card reader or PCI card and have never lost a photo. You'll save battery life on your camera too.
Also, did you by chance change the name of the library under
/users/pictures/? iPhoto is funky and will only understand "iPhoto Library" unless you have downloaded iPhoto Library Manager (which allows for the creation and navigation of multiple libraries).
You can download it here
One thing I never ever do is transfer photos directly from the camera to my system. I have always used an external firewire card reader or PCI card and have never lost a photo. You'll save battery life on your camera too.
For me, iPhoto works fantastically well. I have downloaded pictures from my own camera and from those belonging to various friends and family members. I have also downloaded from digital film inserted in various card readers with no problems at all. The only problem I have ever had was my brother's Wal-Mart special which does not support USB automounting. My sister's WinXP laptop will produce a few botched downloads, but no such problem on my old G3 laptop or my 2 GHz G5. In no case, however, have I ever lost a single picture.Declan said:
raynegus said:
If you read Declan's other threads it is obvious he/she is new to the mac after 19 years of PC...give him/her a break...just having problems with iPhoto...probably something somewhat simple but sometimes those are the most frustrating and difficult to figure out.
Waiting for more info.
Johnny
flyfish29 said:
Yeah, unless you put them in an album, you should automatically see them in two places: the first item on the left labelled "Photo Library" and the second, labelled "Last Import" (hope this is the same in the iLife 04 version).
Not that its justifiable, and not that you should have to, but I would personally recommend that you don't use the option to auto delete the files from the camera's memory card when you DL them, until you are comfortable with iPhoto.
Also one more thing regarding your restart. Did you manually close iPhoto when you restarted, or did you let it automatically close during the restart, or was it a crash recovery?
Hmmm...FWIW I never do this. I just unplug after the transfer is done. I don't even get any error msgs doing this. Now with my iPod is a different story.
Yeah, I wished that if you selected an Album the did the import, the pictures would go into the selected Album. And I also wish that maybe option+cmd+delete would delete a picture from the album AND Library. Damn... my campus had someone who actually codes iPhoto oncampus and I had a stupid class. Damn the academics.
7on said:
Okay, newbie schooling time...what is the diff between opt-del and opt-cmd-del in iPhoto? Or right now does the latter do nothing? That is kinda annoying, now that you mention it. I usually play with my photos in last import before I put them in an album, but it would be useful like you suggest.
If you delete them from Photo Library, though, they're gone gone, right?
I had major problems with iphoto about 6 months or a year ago, I can't remember exactly when it was. I had imported around 2,000 photos at that time, and had them all nicely set up in albums.
One day, about half of them were gone! The albums were gone and the photos were also actually missing from my iphoto library.
I panicked of course as I had not done a recent backup (doh!). However with some help (can't remember if it was here at macrumors or on the Apple discussion boards), I found that my photos were in fact still on my hard-disk somewhere in the iphoto folders but were not being recognised by iphoto. I tried all sorts of things to recover the photos - can't remember exactly what, but I think it was renaming or recreating the library or something. Anyway, it didn't work.
I had to completely start again and reimport all my photos from the folders on my harddisk. I lost a lot of the ordering and albums but at least I had my actual photos. Someone from Apple told me that this had happened because I had messed with the contents of the iphoto library folder, but I deny this. I had never been anywhere near that folder until after the photos disappeared. I simply did not do anything and the photos just disappeared. I understand this has happened to a lot of other customers but that Apple has not been able to properly identify the problem or produce a fix.
What I now do is copy my photos directly from my camera to a folder on my external hard-disk. I give the folder a name that makes sense to me - e.g. "trip to Paris, February 2004". I then import the contents of this folder using iphoto and let it do it's strange cataloging business.
This is not ideal, as it is not as simply to do as simply plugging in the camera and clicking import. It is more like what I would expect to do on a PC, but at least it works and is safe. It also means I have 2 copies of all my photos (on 2 different disks which is good in case one fails.) I also have a copy of the files that I can use in other applications without upsetting iphoto and without having to export them from iphoto first.
I use iphoto for viewing, printing, publishing to homepage etc, but I like the fact that I can also see all the files in properly named folders that I am in control of! I would hate to ever have the scare again of thinking that I had lost all my photos.
Hope this is helpful or interesting. I'm sorry if it isn't!
Dobbin
PS. You can see some of my photos at http://homepage.mac.com/robin.h if you'd like to. There are some gaps as I am currently updating it all.
One day, about half of them were gone! The albums were gone and the photos were also actually missing from my iphoto library.
I panicked of course as I had not done a recent backup (doh!). However with some help (can't remember if it was here at macrumors or on the Apple discussion boards), I found that my photos were in fact still on my hard-disk somewhere in the iphoto folders but were not being recognised by iphoto. I tried all sorts of things to recover the photos - can't remember exactly what, but I think it was renaming or recreating the library or something. Anyway, it didn't work.
I had to completely start again and reimport all my photos from the folders on my harddisk. I lost a lot of the ordering and albums but at least I had my actual photos. Someone from Apple told me that this had happened because I had messed with the contents of the iphoto library folder, but I deny this. I had never been anywhere near that folder until after the photos disappeared. I simply did not do anything and the photos just disappeared. I understand this has happened to a lot of other customers but that Apple has not been able to properly identify the problem or produce a fix.
What I now do is copy my photos directly from my camera to a folder on my external hard-disk. I give the folder a name that makes sense to me - e.g. "trip to Paris, February 2004". I then import the contents of this folder using iphoto and let it do it's strange cataloging business.
This is not ideal, as it is not as simply to do as simply plugging in the camera and clicking import. It is more like what I would expect to do on a PC, but at least it works and is safe. It also means I have 2 copies of all my photos (on 2 different disks which is good in case one fails.) I also have a copy of the files that I can use in other applications without upsetting iphoto and without having to export them from iphoto first.
I use iphoto for viewing, printing, publishing to homepage etc, but I like the fact that I can also see all the files in properly named folders that I am in control of! I would hate to ever have the scare again of thinking that I had lost all my photos.
Hope this is helpful or interesting. I'm sorry if it isn't!
Dobbin
PS. You can see some of my photos at http://homepage.mac.com/robin.h if you'd like to. There are some gaps as I am currently updating it all.
Oh yes, I forgot to say: If I unplug my camera (Pentax 450) without trashing the icon first then I get the warning message but I've never lost any data this way. My old camera (Kodak) that I had when I 'lost' my photos had a docking station and I could just put it on and off without trashing the icon. In fact as I remember, there wasn't a desktop icon for it, it only showed up within iphoto I think.
There are two ways to load photos, using iPhoto and Image Capture. Image Capture just finds any movies and photos and places them in the Pictures and Movies folders. It will even parse JPEG files from the older Kodak cameras that stored sound with the JPEG file format to separate WAV files.
iPhoto stores them directly into it's database structure and only deals with pictures from the camera and not movies or sound. I can see when someone is importing that they may confuse Image Capture with iPhoto for importing photos. Perhaps iLife '05 will address this confusion.
iPhoto stores them directly into it's database structure and only deals with pictures from the camera and not movies or sound. I can see when someone is importing that they may confuse Image Capture with iPhoto for importing photos. Perhaps iLife '05 will address this confusion.
Well lots of opinions about me, well let me just say, yes i am new to using macs but absolutely love my new mac and would never consider going back.
As to what happened,
I had successfully imported several times, and always before removing my digital camera, i would drop the removable drive (sdcard) onto trash can to safely disconnect.
After importing several times, i started to create several albums/folders and move photos into these.
Then after starting up iPhoto later that night, i had to force it to quite, because halfway through moving a photo, the busy cursor appeared.
So upon restarting my albums/folders were there but empty.
I had only imported approx 50 photos, and can retake but imagine if i had lots more and couldn't retake the photos..thats why i wasn't happy.
Also to note, the photos were completely gone, as i searched the hard drive.
As to what happened,
I had successfully imported several times, and always before removing my digital camera, i would drop the removable drive (sdcard) onto trash can to safely disconnect.
After importing several times, i started to create several albums/folders and move photos into these.
Then after starting up iPhoto later that night, i had to force it to quite, because halfway through moving a photo, the busy cursor appeared.
So upon restarting my albums/folders were there but empty.
I had only imported approx 50 photos, and can retake but imagine if i had lots more and couldn't retake the photos..thats why i wasn't happy.
Also to note, the photos were completely gone, as i searched the hard drive.
I use iview media pro. its over 100$ but well worth it. its also at least 5-6 times faster. when I saw how fast it loaded and rendered photos I was totally blow away. its speed increase over iphoto is even greater when it comes to importing pictures. very very fast and rock solid.
Well, isn't is nice that so many people have thoughts about you and your intentions.Declan said:
I figured your explanation was gonna be similar to what you wrote. I am sorry to hear about your experience with iPhoto...which I guess is exactly why I back up often...come to think of it I have not backed up my kids photos lately...better do that soon.
Have you searched apple support about this problem...wondering if there is an explanation there about why it might be happening.
What version of iPhoto are you using and what OS?
i had the same thing happen right after i loaded iLife '04, except i actually had about 800 pics in my library covering about 2 years. i had trouble trying to re-import all the pics until i deleted iPhoto, everything iPhoto related, like all of the iPhoto files in my applications library. then reinstalled iphoto. . . and imported my pics individually. everything has been working since (for a couple of months) except for the things iPhoto has always screwed up (like playing a slide show). i have been an avid mac enthusiast for two years now and i still think iPhoto is the one thing apple has completely screwed up. everything else mac works all the time, why wont iPhoto? the only other programs ive had as much trouble with (or any trouble with at all) are M$ programs, like IE explorer or M$ media player or M$ word. come on, whos iPhoto actually works as well as their other mac programs?!!!!
wPod said:
Mine does, always worked a treat, and with iphoto 4 it is much faster too. Never had a single issue with iphoto.
MisterMe said:
True dat!! My cannon 300d and iphoto is a money maker...iphoto has never messed up for me