Never mess with your wife's Mac. Lost pictures

[David Linneman]

My wife has a 5 year-old iMac 21 that has been doggy lately due to a huge iphoto gallery. I recently attempted to delete a few of my pictures but wasn't paying attention (an old man with ADD) and viola, lost all of her photos.

Luckily, we have all photos backuped to May 2013 on an old LeCie external hard drive. Unfortunately, iphoto has labeled the file as "backup" and cannot be moved to the main library.

I have been able to "preview" the photos but cannot get iPhoto to recognize them. All attempts to "option" the "other library" reveals the camera photos and "downloads," but the iPhoto library remains visible but not accessible.

The size of this folder 107.85 GB compounds this problem.

How can I get my wee-derriere out of hot water?

 

[PsyOpWarlord]

Is this an old iPhoto Library file that all the images are in?

If so you might be able to right click [ctrl-clcik] and select Show Package Contents .. Then just copy the Master Folder to your computer. The you should be able to use Photos/iPhoto to import the all the photos form the Masters folder.

 

[cruisin]

I just want to jump in and say you should have a second USB drive connected to the iMac and set it as a Time Machine backup location. It will make a backup of your computer every hour and you will avoid issues like this in the future.

 

[joe-h2o]

As a previous poster said, if you right click on the backup library and select "Show package contents" you'll be able to navigate it like a set of regular folders and you should be able to manually recover the photos you want and re-add them to iPhoto.

In the future I'd definitely connect and external HD to your iMac and have Time Machine set up - it will keep your enormous photo library backed up so you can restore it if you make an error like this again.

Always back up!