Iphoto 6 "photo cannot be found,etc.

Question

Somehow about 300+ of my 3400 photos now have been lost except for the thumbnails that have been degraded from 2272 X 1704 pixels down to 1/4 of that. They can only be viewed in Preview - can't e-mail or anything else either. I kept getting the msg. "the volume for 105-057_crw cannot be found or "photo cannot be opened because original item cannot be found". Many times trying to view a thumbnail in a folder with that conflicting number I would get a different photo.
Backup can't be done because I get those messages a million times b4 I can burn the library. The photos with duplicate i.d. numbers (probably from different cameras) are now gone after doing the rebuilding.
I guess the only thing left is repopulating. Can anybody advise - will it help or likely aggravate?
In short Iphoto has really screwed me up. I brought a lot of this over from windows (canon program) and now have lost a lot of new pictures. A lot I didn't like about the PC but this stinks.

Answer 1

Hi CM -
Not sure that this will solve all your problems, but I wanted to pass along a discovery I had (posted previously on another thread, but I thought it closely enough related to repost).
I was receiving the consistent error, "couldn't find DSCN####.JPG". The files in question were there, could be found using spotlight in the find file dialog and otherwise, but iPhoto would not accept them. I was able to open them using other apps, duplicate them, repair permissions, etc etc so on and so forth.
Stop. Look. Listen. The file name being identified by iPhoto was "....JPG", and the file name was actually "....jpg". I manually changed the case on the file tag to "JPG". iPhoto now accepted the file. Repeat. Identical performance.
After doing about as many as I could stand this way I made sure changing the case of the filename before the tag didn't make a difference (or at least sure enough for me, YMMV). Then I got Automator to Rename Finder Items - Change Case. On the entire Data folder.
Came back in the morning and it was done. Ran thru the remainder of the Upgrading Thumbnails task that iPhoto was running. Had to tell it which file was which on a random selection of files -- was quicker just to select the file it wanted than to try to figure out why it couldn't find them for itself. Once that was done, my library is all better.
Computers are such dandy labor-saving devices.
HTH
j
TiBook 667, G4 MT 800 DP, PB 17   Mac OS X (10.4.9)