Dear Forum,
About 1 month ago my dad came to me with this odd problem: many of his photos on his iPhoto library were shown in the thumbnails but when you clicked on them, the actual photo would not show up. A big, gray exclamation mark would be displayed instead.
I googled the problem and I found a couple of posts of people with similar problems. Apparently iPhoto can sometimes lose its structure and you may need to "repair" or "rebuild" the library. No big deal - I said. I followed the advice in the posts and made a copy of the whole iPhoto Library folder "just in case". (step 1)
I restarted iPhoto (while holding alt+cmd) and tried every single repair option without success.
I started to worry a bit more.
- "show in finder" option will not work for the lost photos.
- I tried using spotlight with a name of a lost file but it will only get me thumbnails or previews, not the original file.
- I finally used the terminal and browsed around a bit:
For what I get there's a MASTERS directory at the root of the iPhoto library that contains subdirectories named after the year of import, so for example I have folders MASTERS/2012 and MASTERS/2013
Judging by the photos that I'm missing, there should have been a MASTERS/2011 directory that is now gone. This should represent about 4Gb worth of data.
Solving my problem now:
Unfortunately even specialized software might be unable to recover my photos as I made a huge copy of the iPhoto library at
step 1.
Preventing disaster from happening again:
Backups of course. But in order to avoid repeating such an unpleasant experience I need to understand what exactly happened and why. Is the drive damaged? Do I have a virus infection?
Is there a way to accidentally erase a whole MASTERS directory from iPhoto?
Is iPhoto simply SO unreliable?
thanks a lot for reading, hopefully someone can help me out here.
__________________________________
PS. I'm using iPhoto 9.1.5 on a 2011 imac with Lion
About 1 month ago my dad came to me with this odd problem: many of his photos on his iPhoto library were shown in the thumbnails but when you clicked on them, the actual photo would not show up. A big, gray exclamation mark would be displayed instead.
I googled the problem and I found a couple of posts of people with similar problems. Apparently iPhoto can sometimes lose its structure and you may need to "repair" or "rebuild" the library. No big deal - I said. I followed the advice in the posts and made a copy of the whole iPhoto Library folder "just in case". (step 1)
I restarted iPhoto (while holding alt+cmd) and tried every single repair option without success.
I started to worry a bit more.
- "show in finder" option will not work for the lost photos.
- I tried using spotlight with a name of a lost file but it will only get me thumbnails or previews, not the original file.
- I finally used the terminal and browsed around a bit:
For what I get there's a MASTERS directory at the root of the iPhoto library that contains subdirectories named after the year of import, so for example I have folders MASTERS/2012 and MASTERS/2013
Judging by the photos that I'm missing, there should have been a MASTERS/2011 directory that is now gone. This should represent about 4Gb worth of data.
Solving my problem now:
- Do you guys see anything that I could have missed? Do I have any hope to find my original photos somewhere else in the hard disk?
- Otherwise, could someone recommend a good data recovery software (ideally free or not very expensive)?
Unfortunately even specialized software might be unable to recover my photos as I made a huge copy of the iPhoto library at
step 1.
Preventing disaster from happening again:
Backups of course. But in order to avoid repeating such an unpleasant experience I need to understand what exactly happened and why. Is the drive damaged? Do I have a virus infection?
Is there a way to accidentally erase a whole MASTERS directory from iPhoto?
Is iPhoto simply SO unreliable?
thanks a lot for reading, hopefully someone can help me out here.
__________________________________
PS. I'm using iPhoto 9.1.5 on a 2011 imac with Lion