Fixing iPhoto for modified originals

Question

Hey all...I'm in a bit of a pickle. A while back, I got it into my head that I should start shooting RAW, even though I rarely adjust any of my photos. For more than a year, I tore through every last megabyte on my iMac's hard drive. All my photos are stored (and backed up) in folders outside of my iPhoto library.
At one point, when I was running less than a gigabyte free, I saw that iPhoto was using over 30GB just for a full-size JPEG copies of every RAW one. I deleted these, and since this was back with the previous version of iPhoto, it would still load the original file after a bit of a delay. iPhoto '08 removed that feature and now it never loads the file, just shows a horribly ugly (scaled up 40x or so) question mark logo. So that's half the pickle...I can "reprocess RAW" but simply didn't have the space.
Realizing I was fighting a losing battle, I decided I didn't want the double overhead of using RAW files. I wrote an Automator action and have been convert them all to JPEG, archiving the .cr2 files on discs and then deleting them off my disk. This really made iPhoto hate me. Now every time I import photos, it pops up a hundred dialogs saying a photo is missing (yes, I know) and do I want to find it? Each one of these dialogs makes the import pause, so I can't just walk away and have iPhoto inform me of the gory details later. (Today I got so frustrated that I hit "Mute", set my wireless mouse on the spacebar, and prayed that no serious dialog would come up from another program during the import.)
So my question is this:
Is there a way to easily either 1) automatically tell iPhoto that the JPEGs are the RAW photos, just with different format/name or 2) automatically apply events and ratings to a fresh library from the old library? I tried deleting (moving, rather) everything but the AlbumData.xml file from my iPhoto Library and then doing a Cmd-Option repair, but that file appears to be 110% read-only. (Otherwise I could "Find and Replace" in that file and be on my way.)
At this point I'm almost tempted to throw in the towel and start from scratch. Maybe it will speed startup/shutdown and reduce hangs — couldn't hurt anyway. Only a small percentage my photographs are rated or in custom-split events, but out of nearly 43,000 that's still a few and I'd lose all 1,374 hand picked Event Key Photos too.
It's really frustrating that every time I start investing in a photo library/program, I end up needing to start from scratch again. When I moved from Picasa to iPhoto years ago, I had only a fraction of the photos I do now. Does iPhoto have any sorta-hidden Import options besides "Librarify all these images as brand new"?
thanks,
-natevw

Answer 1

I accept all responsibility for mucking about in the internals/referenced files, and certainly don't want to encourage anyone who isn't willing to risk complete destruction of their library to do so. I urgently needed free space, I knew my original pictures were safe outside of iPhoto's database package, and I made a backup of the AlbumData.xml so as to a least have a non-proprietary memento of my metadata. Don't try any of that at home unless you're willing to risk *complete data loss* or the sort of pain I describe above.
You can try Download iPhoto Library Manager and use its rebuild function. This will create a new library based on data in the albumdata.xml file. Not everything will be brought over - no slideshows, books or calendars, for instance - but it should get all your albums and keywords back. However - and this is big however, it all depends on the set up of your AlbumData.xml file, which is likely to be terminally confused at this point - but give it a go. It won't make anything worse.
Excellent! That sounds like precisely what would be helpful at this point. Over the weekend it appears I added incompetence to willful negligence by accidentally importing photos from my removable backup drive rather than my internal one. I've written off that library as a loss, but have been careful about backing up the AlbumData.xml file.
(Oh, btw, that AlbumData.xml file is not the database file, it's simply the file that other apps use to integrate with iPhoto. Changing things there won't help.)
I was aware that in normal use this file is just dumped to by iPhoto for third-party use. I was hoping iPhoto could at least be forced to manually restore afresh from it, but if an independent program can do this trick for it, then they've earned my $20.
Finally, is there a reason why you've chosen to manage the photos yourself? Much of what you've gone through would have been avoidable if you had let iPhoto do it - and even more importantly, recovering the situation would have been easier too.
Keeping the "Finder world" and the "iPhoto world" separate lets me backup my photos. I copy pictures from my cards directly onto two different hard drives, before erasing them off the card. I can also burn discs more easily; when I have enough new nnnCANON folders to fill a DVD, I archive them. iPhoto's database wants to be treated as a single opaque file even though its caches alone would fill several DVDs. To my mind, iPhoto is just a browser/organizer and I like to manage underlying files manually.
I also trust the basic operating system more than iPhoto with my (to me) precious originals. While I have no doubts that the iPhoto team is competent and conscientious, the HFS+ filesystem doesn't get a point release every few months and a major upgrade every year or two. I am slowly learning to not fight the system, but in this case there is no way I would consider letting iPhoto sequester hundreds of gigabytes of my least-recreatable data inside one package I am not supposed to look inside.
thanks,
-natevw