Daughters 1st Birthday photos missing, please HELP!!!

Question

I recently transfered my daughters first b-day photos from my Canon 20D, into iphoto. The photos were all there I even viewed them as a slide show. A few hours later I was going to import some new photos into iphoto. I noticed even though the camera was not hooked up there was a button that said import. I hit the button to import but I noticed it was importing the old photos again from the b-day party. I hit cancel, hooked up my camera and imported my new photos in. At first the b-day photos showed up in the small thumbs, but when I tried to open them in larger view the photo were gone and instead a grey dotted outline showed up with an exclamtion point. I tried to transfer the photos to a disc but they would not transfer. I looked at the iphoto library and the photos are not there.
I did receive a message saying my scratch disc was full. So I clean off some space on my hard drive, then I held down the option and the keys and restarted iphoto. It just got rid of the greyed out photos all together. I also tried removing the iphoto library and rebuilding it, but that did not work.
Iphoto had recently been doing some weird things like not putting the 2007 photos in the library folder.
Please help!!!!

Answer 1

Hello,
Welcome to the discussions.
I recently transfered my daughters first b-day photos from my Canon 20D, into iphoto. The photos were all there I even viewed them as a slide show. A few hours later I was going to import some new photos into iphoto. I noticed even though the camera was not hooked up there was a button that said import. I hit the button to import but I noticed it was importing the old photos again from the b-day party. I hit cancel, hooked up my camera and imported my new photos in. At first the b-day photos showed up in the small thumbs, but when I tried to open them in larger view the photo were gone and instead a grey dotted outline showed up with an exclamtion point. I tried to transfer the photos to a disc but they would not transfer. I looked at the iphoto library and the photos are not there.
How did you 'transfer' the photos from your camera? It sounds as if you may have downloaded them into another folder, maybe something set up by the camera just for viewing, but not yet imported into iPhoto. That is why iPhoto was still saying 'import.' The photos needed to be imported into iPhoto. You started the process, got some of the thumbnails, but did not get all the photos. Did the second set of photos import ok? Did you import them differently?
Here are several threads that might help: here
and here
These are for trying to locate and restore iPhoto. Your problem may be simpler. It sounds as if the photos never made it into iPhoto. You could do a search for all jpegs and see if you can locate your photos, then open iPhoto and drag them into it.
Have you deleted the photos from your camera already?
I recommend that you do not do this, delete them manually afer you are sure that they are in iphoto.
Obviously, if the photos are still in your camera, you can just reimport them.
You should use ImageCapture (applications) for downloading. It is an app that reads your camera and puts up thumbnails of all the photos for you. You can choose which ones to download and what folder to put them in. I usually name the folder what I want the roll name to be and put it on my desktop. Even though iPhoto opens and says it is ready to import, ignore it for now.
Then, choose 'download' from the ImageCapture window. After the photos are downloaded to the desktop folder, I close ImageCapture, disconnect my camera and then drag that folder into iPhoto.
If the photos are not in your camera, you may still be able to recover them from the memory card of your camera.
Post back if none of this helps!
iMac FP 1GHz 80GB 1.25RAM, ext drives: Maxtor, Lacie   Mac OS X (10.4.8)   iPhoto6.0.5, iTunes7.0.2, iMovie6.0.3, iDVD6.0.3