IPhoto 6 upgrade Undo

Question

I am in big trouble. Half of my granddaughter's first place finish volleyball tournament photos from this weekend are in iPhoto 5. I could not download the last day's photos because iPhoto kept quitting on startup so I figured the app was corrupt and just bought iPhoto 6 figuring that would fix the whole thing.
Now iPhoto 6 says it can't update the old library because it is damaged.
I tried reloading iPhoto 5 from that original disk but it won't let me. The iPhoto app disk doesn't have an uninstall option.
I didn't back up the library while traveling, so what are my options? thanks, a proud but worried grandpa

Answer 1

HI grandpa,
You can install iPhoto 5 again, but since the library data is corrupt I am pretty sure that iPhoto 5 will also not be able to open the library.
iPhoto 5 is smart about not importing the thumbnail folders into a new library though, so you might want to go that route. After you get all your images into a new iPhoto 5 library, then you can install iPhoto 6 with a nice new library to be upgraded.
So here goes...
-Drag iPhoto.app to the trash
-Navigate to your Library/Receipts folder and drag any iPhoto receipts in there to the trash
-Insert iLife 5 DVD
-do a custom install of just iPhoto
-run software update to update iPhoto 5 to the last revision
-Navigate to your Pictures folder and rename the iPhoto Library folder to "iPhoto Library_old"
-Drag the iPhoto Library_old to the desktop
-Launch iPhoto and have it 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 highlight it in the window, then click the "open" button.
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!
If you get this far, great!
You can at this point upgrade iPhoto to iPhoto 6 by doing a custom install of just iPhoto, run software upgrade to get it to 6.0.2.
Now you can enjoy all the new fun things in iPhoto 6 such as calendars and cards, etc.