IPhoto 5 not loading pictures

Question

I recently downloaded iLife and am trying to open it, but when I open it, it says the pictures need to be reformatted, but when I click OK to upload them, it takes about 15 minutes, then nothing happens and it says it is not responding. I also tried burning my photo library to a disc, opening iPhoto with the option-command buttons depressed and loading them that way, but it says the files are unreadable.
What do I do?

Answer 1

Hi Dani,
When you say you recently downloaded iLife, what do you mean by that?
iLife has to be installed from the iLife CD/DVD? Is that what you mean?
If you launched iPhoto 5 it should say it needs to "upgrade" the library to work with the newer version of iPhoto.
If you do have an older library that you are trying to upgrade do this:
Navigate to ~/Pictures/iPhoto Library
Drag out the three thumbnail files you see in there to the desktop.
Drag out the Albums folder and the Albums.xml file to the trash.
now launch iPhoto and see if it will upgrade your library.
If iPhoto will still not upgrade your library then you can easily create a new library and import your images from the old library.
Close iPhoto
Rename your messed up iPhoto Library to "iPhoto Library_old"
Drag this library to your desktop
Hold down the Option key and launch iPhoto
This is the window you will get
Create a new library or choose a library to open
Choose to create a new library
Once this new empty library is open it is time to import the images from your old library
Go to File>add to library
Navigate to the old library on your desktop and choose it.
iPhoto will start importing the images from your old library
This is what to expect:
Your images will be imported in nice dated rolls. (make sure your view is set to sort by rolls to see it) There are a couple of caveats to this. You will get rolls named "Originals" These rolls will contain your video clips and your original images that you had edited. If you had RAW files they would be in those rolls too (I don't do RAW, so I don't know for sure) Delete what you don't want from those rolls. You will also get the jpeg pointer files to your video clips imported. They will just be jpegs and will not point to the video clips anymore as iPhoto made new ones when the clips were imported again. You can delete those. they should be in a roll right next to the newly imported video clips so they are not hard to find. The thumbnail files don't get imported as iPhoto makes new ones when the images are imported.
Once all you images have been imported, check through the library and make sure everything looks ok.
You can now start making your Albums, and do your keywords or any other organizational steps.
You can also delete the old library on the desktop.
It is also a good time to backup this new library to CD/DVD by burning the iPhoto LIbrary folder in the Finder, or copying the iPhoto Library folder to an external drive formatted for Macs, or copying the iPhoto LIbrary folder to an iPod.
Good luck!
Lori