Moving pictures BACK to iphoto library problems *PLEASE HELP

[JimTigerPT]

OK,
This morning I tried to open my iphoto and it says I have no library. I did not do anything to my knowledge so I figured the folder must be somewhere. I first looked in the trash. Somehow the folder with my pictures was moved to the trash. I found the folder "iphoto albums" and dragged it out of the trash back into the pictures folder. It does appear to list all of my pictures that I had but when I try to open one of them it says the picture cannot be opened because the original item could not be found and gives me the option to "fix alias". I created another iphoto library and tried to point it to the picture folder but still could not find the pictures.

I am at a loss right now. I do not want to screw around with something and lose them. I had all of my pictures organized along with events. This is very frustrating.

Yes I know, I did not use time machine nor have an EHD. I will be getting one soon. I have learned my lesson.

If anyone can guide with with this would be very grateful.

 

[Fishtalk]

Yeahh, same thing happened to me.... Suddenly my iPhoto was empty for no particular reason... After panicking for 30 minutes, I dug around and found the libary " somewhere" then spent hours/days putting it all back manually ( sliding foto's from one place to another)... Then recently my mac had a kernal panic which mean't I had to reinstall my OS after fixing the problem. Ha ha ha... I thought I had all my photos backed up on my ext.HD....BUT no it doesn't back automatically and I lost 6 months of photos. Anyway back to your problem. iPhoto is the schits. Every time you touch or move any thing you lose more photos.
What you could try is re naming you Libary ( ie iPhoto Libary 2)...then normally when you open iPhotos you get " do you want to search for the new libary" or something like that... click YES and that should be it.
All that is in therory 'cos when I tried it it didn't "quite work out"...
If I had the courage I'd find another PHOTO app. and throw iPhoto out... iPhoto is one of the few app's that MAC didn't get right...`good luck

 

[JimTigerPT]

Well, I lost probably 25% of my photos. Library folder was no where to be found but could find some of them in images. Weird that the photo albums still were there with all of the pictures but when you click on them the originals could not be found. I am at least glad that some were there. I created a new library and starting over. I just ordered a 1 TB EHD and will be using time machine for now on. Hopefully that will give me some peace of mind. My daughter freaked when I told her because she has 3000 pictures and she thinks she will lose them now. I will back up both my powerbook and her macbook hopefully next week.

 

[johto]

http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/timemachine.html

 

[JimTigerPT]

Thanks for the time machine info and link! One question, what do you generally NOT have to back up or may not be not necessary?; just filling up space? Thanks...