Importing photos from old MacBook Pro produced 000's of copies

Question

Hi
I backed up all my old photos (not many, less than one thousand) from my old MacBook Pro using an external harddrive.  I bought a new MacBook Pro and attempted to upload these into iPhoto on my new machine.  For some reason it has created over 25000 photos and appears to have split out every photo several of times focusing on every individual face. This is not just the use of the faces tool, it has actually created a separate photo for each.
Any advice as to how i can get rid of these - rather than have to indiviudally delete them - would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

Hi.
If you've copied the entire iPhoto Library Folder to your new MacBook Pro, all you need to do now is point iPhoto to its location. Hold the Option key while you launch iPhoto. Click "Choose Library" then navigate to the iPhoto Library folder and Open. If the library was created with a previous version of iPhoto, then you should get a warning that the library needs to be updated by iPhoto 6, which will make it unreadable by previous versions of iPhoto. Allow it to update the library. It should then open with all of your old photos visible.
Unless your user accounts on the 2 Macs have exactly the same name, there could be a permissions conflict. Old Toad often recommends you use BatChmod to correct the permissions on the iPhoto Library folder after you copy it to the new Mac, before you try to open iPhoto. The following is a quote from Old Toad:
"...download and run BatChmod on the iPhoto Library folder with the settings shown here, putting your administrative name, long or short, in the owner and group sections. You can either type in the path to the folder or just drag the folder into that field."