IPhoto 11 Upgrade/Transfer Issue

Question

Hi there,
I have just bought a new iMac and migrated over all of my content from my old MacBook where i had my Photo library installed on an external drive. This included an upgrade from Photo 9 to 11 and I installed the 9.1 update first as well.
The problem comes from the linking. When I originally started with iPhoto I imported pics into my library but had them sitting in two other folders, then after a while I put new pics straight into iPhoto itself so they were going directly into that folder.
All fine and this worked well, the problem now is since this move and upgrade all the links to the ones sitting in other folders are broken even though they still appear seemingly correct as links in the iPhoto/Masters directory. I cannot see a way of knowing exactly how many pics have broken links - it is thousands - and I can't see a way of fixing these links that is not the painfully slow one at a time method. Even this is a lot harder than it should be as I am getting constant bombardment of messages of Files Not Found for ones I am not even working on.
Any ideas?
Thanks,
Craig

Answer 1

I had similar issues to those mentioned here after moving my iPhoto '09 library from an iMac to a MacBook and then upgrading the library to iPhoto '11. What I had forgotten to do before the upgrade was also copy the referenced folders where many of my older pics were.
I had to go through a painstaking process of fixing the records in the RKMaster table. The problem you are getting, I believe, is because iPhoto '11 no longer uses the file aliases that iPhoto '09 used. What it does instead is store the location of the referenced file in the BLOB column fileAliasData in the RKMaster table. If you use SQLiteManager you can save the contents of a BLOB column to a file, which in this case is in plist format. Inside the plist you'll see a key called FileAlias with some base64 encoded data. That data points to where the original file is/was, which probably has a reference to your old server.
The only solution I found was:
- copy all my referenced images to the folder structure under Masters in the iPhoto Library folder
- put the correct path in imagePath in RKMaster
- set fileIsReference = 0 and fileAliasData = null in RKMaster so that iPhoto now treats the file as managed, and not referenced.
Note, that if a file is under the Masters folder structure, the path in imagePath must be relative to the Masters folder. For example, if the image file is in /Users/kevin/Pictures/iPhoto Library/Masters/2008/Christmas/img001.jpg then what you need to put in imagePath is just 2008/Christmas/img001.jpg. iPhoto assumes this is under the Masters folder for non-referenced images.
Incidentally, you can use the steps above to convert any referenced files in your library to managed, allthough it's pretty tedious. I did it, and it was worth it as I now have my entire iPhoto Library inside the iPhoto Library folder which is completely transportable.
There are 2 things which Apple could have done a lot better:
- if you're upgrading an old iPhoto library, it should warn you if some of the files are unavailable, because you won't find out about it until you try to edit one of the files (the thumbnails are still there), by which time it might be too late to recover the old files
- there should be an option for consolidating an iPhoto Library which is a mixture of managed and referenced into the iPhoto Library folder to be completely managed, just as iTunes lets you do for music.