Photos Gone after Accidentally Turning off Camera Connected to iPhoto

Question

I aborted an import of photos to iPhoto from my digital camera, then accidentally turned it off without unmounting it. Suddenly, the iPhoto library only displayed very old photos and none within the last year. All the photos DO exist in my iPhoto Library folder in the Finder window, however. So, how do I re-establish the connection between iPhoto's database and my hard drive's photos? It seems something got corrupted.
If the answer is to hold command+option when opening iPhoto, which of the four checkbox options should I choose?
Thanks in advance!!

Answer 1

HI ker7,
You can choose all the options, with the finding lost photos the most important.
If that doesn't work you can create a new library and import the images from the old.
Close iPhoto
Rename your messed up iPhoto Library to "iPhoto Library_old"
Drag this library to your desktop
Hold down the Option key and launch iPhoto
This is the window you will get
Create a new library or choose a library to open
Choose to create a new library
Once this new empty library is open it is time to import the images from your old library
Go to File>add to library
Navigate to the old library on your desktop and highlight it in the window, then click the "import" button.
iPhoto will start importing the images from your old library
This is what to expect:
Your images will be imported in nice dated rolls. (make sure your view is set to sort by rolls to see it) There are a couple of caveats to this. You will get rolls named "Originals" These rolls will contain your video clips and your original images that you had edited. If you had RAW files they would be in those rolls too (I don't do RAW, so I don't know for sure) Delete what you don't want from those rolls. You will also get the jpeg pointer files to your video clips imported. They will just be jpegs and will not point to the video clips anymore as iPhoto made new ones when the clips were imported again. You can delete those. they should be in a roll right next to the newly imported video clips so they are not hard to find. The thumbnail files don't get imported as iPhoto makes new ones when the images are imported.
Once all you images have been imported, check through the library and make sure everything looks ok.
You can now start making your Albums, and do your keywords or any other organizational steps.
You can also delete the old library on the desktop.
It is also a good time to backup this new library to CD/DVD by burning the iPhoto LIbrary folder in the Finder, or copying the iPhoto Library folder to an external drive formatted for Macs, or copying the iPhoto LIbrary folder to an iPod.
Good luck!