HT4927 Why can't we restore a single photo in iPhoto anymore?

Question

The loss of this functionality has been anoying and I sincerely hope that Apple brings it back someday. It makes Time Machine a lot less useful for customers and also potentially leads to the loss of more data. It used to be that you could restore a single image, say that was acidentally deleted. Now if you were to restore the entire iPhoto Library with Time Machine, you'd get the one image back but lose every other image you added since then. That make no sense. Of course Time Machine will ask if you want to overwrite thr iPhoto Library or duplicate and keep the original, but how many people are going to know they should keep the original? And if you have a large library you may not have the space. Even if you did dupe the Library you would then need to Open the restored Library (hold option while opening iPhoto and select the Library), find the image you want back, copy it out of the old Library, quit iPhoto, re-open iPhoto with the existing Library, re-add the photo you want to restore. Way too many steps.
There is another workaround that I will share here, but it too is too complex for many people. Bottom line Apple needs to bring back the old method for restoring iPhotos using Time Machine.
Here's how I would restore a single image in iPhoto with Time Machine. I personally also make an extra backup of the iPhoto Library before using this method, just in case.
Go to ~/Pictures/iPhoto Library
Right+Click the iPhoto Library and choose 'Show Package Contents'
Click the 'Originals' alias
Now you should see a bunch of folders organized by year
Activate Time Machine
Browse back to find the image you want to restore. The folders go by year > month > day. After that the folder and image names are cryptic, but you can use the previews to find the image you want to restore.
Select it and restore it with Time Machine.
I would then move the image out of the ~/Pictures/iPhoto Library package folder and re-add it manually to iPhoto.

Answer 1

There is a way if you know the photo's file name but not fast.
1 - download and launch Find Any File
2 - select the Time Machine drive and search for the file name.
3 - you'll get several hits in each library backup, i.e. the original, thumbnail, preview and editied version.
4 - make sure you choose the file in the Originals or Masters folder and drag from the search results window to the Desktop.
Due to the nature of the backup structure the search can take a while.
Send a feature request to Apple via http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphoto.html to bring back the single photo restore.
OT