I have a macbookpro. when I connect any camera to the mac it does not show as a device. How do I load my pictures to either iPhoto or Aperture? It worked before but just stopped working. Any suggestions?

Question

I have a macbookpro. I use Aperture and Iphoto. When I connect any camera to the Mac it does not open it as a device in Iphoto, Aperture or in Finder. It use to work but just stopped. Any sugestions?

Answer 1

Here is the full story. It may be long so please bear with me. I take a lot of pictures and movies. Since I have over 30,000 pictures I decided to place the Iphoto library on an external drive to save space on my internal drive since ot was getting very full. After I did that it worked fine for a while. Then one day I could not open the Iphoto library. Since I was overseas at the time I brought it to the IStudio ( not an Istore) overseas. They said to rebuild the library and they would do that for me. It took all day since I had so many pictures. When they called me and told me it was ready, I went to pick it up. They started to show me the new library. It crashed again. Not knowing how to fix this at the ISudio, they installed Aperture and imported the Iphoto library. This worked fine for a short time.When back in the states, it crashed again just like Iphoto. I took it to the IStore. They did not know why the overseas Istudio did what they did what they did  and rebuilt my aperture library. Again it worked fine. Now that I am overseas again. It crashed again. However, I concluded that the reason for these crashes is becuase I have the file on an external drive that derives its power from the Mac and not by itself. When I use it and stop for a while the MAC will go to sleep and this cuases the external drive to shut down. This then causes the library to have inconsistancies. Therefore, when it happened this time I tried to repair the library and after 36 hours it would close down Aperture. Therefore I decided to rebuild the library. That did not work either. So I tried opening the Aperture library with Iphoto. That seemed like it was going to work but after importing half of the 30,000 plus pictures. I photo shut down. I then made a new aperture libary and erged the old library with it. This worked. I now have an aperture library that works. However, when I plug my camera into the MAC nothing happens. The camera does not show up in devices in either Aperture, I photo nor in Finder. The USB port and cord I use works fine becuase I can read my external hard drives fine. I checked as SIG suggested in this thread and everything is set to open aperture when the camera is connected.
I have the newest OS version 10. 7. 2 and the computer frequently updates all my programs. I have not installed any ne software lately. The problem happens both if I am on battery or plugged in. Just before I came overseas the IStore replaced the Battery.   I can go back to the IStudio  here overseas but the last time I was there and told them about the problem ( I did not have my computer with me) they did not impress me with their wisdom. I will be back in that city in a month and can go there if need be.  Thanks for all the help so far. God bless.