IPhoto pictures disappeared?

iPhoto pictures disappeared out of nowhere? I had thousands of them, all GONE! I tried EVERYTHING. I restarted my computer, I tried searching in the spotlight for the iPhoto library, I have tried rebooting my iPhoto Library, I tried the Time Machine (but I have never used it before, & that did nothing for me). I have tried probably every possibility you could think of.
When I click onto iPhoto, it is completely new as if I have never used it before - with NO pictures ANYWHERE. I have looked in my trash can, searched in every document, they have vanished off of my computer! Those pictures were not backed up anywhere else (stupid me, I know) and I'm just desperate for answers on how to get them back? Please help! Thank you! contact me:
<Email Edited by Host>

without a backup you may have lost your photos and for sure you will sooner or later
Are you running TM?
what version of the OS do you have? And of iPhoto (for sure = not a guess)
What recently changed?
LN

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Imported iPhoto Pictures Disappeared

Hello Fellow Mac Users!
I have a 2011 MacBook Pro running Lion 10.7.5 and it has all recent updates. I plugged in my Nikon D5100 and imported photos to iPhoto '11. I split and named the events. I imported all of the photos (and unfortunately clicked "Delete Photos from Camera After Import"). All of the photos disappeared from iPhoto (some are in photo stream), I cannot open photo stream from iPhoto on my MacBook (I can open it from my iPhone), and now some events don't have any photos when opened (although they show having photos from the events library) and some are misnamed with the event names from the import.
I have read and write permissions for iPhoto (I am the admin).
I tried restarting the program and computer. There aren't any updates that I am missing. Also, I held down command and alt while launching iPhoto, but no additional dialogue boxes were opened.
Please help.
Thank you!

a best practice to is to never have any computer program (including iPhoto) delete the photos from the card but to import the photos and keep them and then after at least one successful backup cycle has completed and the reformat the card -- I use three very large (32 GB) cards in rotation so I do not reformat for typically a year or more giving me one more long term backup of my photos
Your post goes aroung the field a lot and I am not really clear on what is working and what is not
Imported iPhoto Pictures Disappeared
All of the photos disappeared from iPhoto (some are in photo stream)
I cannot open photo stream from iPhoto on my MacBook (I can open it from my iPhone)
now some events don't have any photos when opened (although they show having photos from the events library)
Also, I held down command and alt while launching iPhoto, but no additional dialogue boxes were opened.
Typically this is because you do not hold the Alt & COmmand keys long enough
You appearently have a MacBook (10.6) and a MacBook Pro (10.7.5)
Did you import the photos to the MS or the MBP? You talk about trying to open PS on the MB with 10.6 - PS requires 10.7.5 or newer - Please explain - do your photos show in PS on the MBP?
what does " some events don't have any photos when opened (although they show having photos from the events library)" mean?
Please try to provide a more clear and concise description of the problem
LN

IPhoto pictures disappears

Since the last uppgrade Drop Box wants to import all my pictures. I choosed not to do that when upgrading. SInce then I can see all my pictures in iPhoto, but in a few seconds almost all photos disappear. I´ve got at backup copy where all photos today are duplicated. What has happened?

Hi guys. I'm wondering if anyone knows why do pictures fromo iPhoto disappears automatically.
These is no "automatic" disappearance of photos in iPhoto - problems with your computer or operational errors can cause photos to "disappear" under some conditions but there is no such thing as an iPhoto automatic disappearance
I opened iPhoto this morning and it's working fine but later on today, i opened it again and all of the pictures are gone. Help??!!
To help you you need to tell us what happened and what is happening - from the time you saw photos until you did not what unusual occurrences were there? What do you see when yo open iPhoto? Did iPhoto ask you to create a new library? Is you library on the internal drive on an external drive? When was you latest backup made? Are you running Time Machine? anything else you can tell us?
LN

Working alternating with iPhoto and FCE tgrying to import pictures from iPhoto into FCE suddenly all my 22300 pictures disappeared leaving empty frames. Does somebody know where the pictures could have gone and how can I get them back into iPhoto? Lothar

Working alternating with iPhoto and FCE tgrying to import pictures from iPhoto into FCE suddenly all my 22300 pictures disappeared leaving empty frames. Does somebody know where the pictures could have gone and how can I get them back into iPhoto? Lothar

The ! turns up when iPhoto loses the connection between the thumbnail in the iPhoto Window and the file it represents.
Option 1
Back Up and try rebuild the library: hold down the command and option (or alt) keys while launching iPhoto. Use the resulting dialogue to rebuild. Choose to Rebuild iPhoto Library Database from automatic backup.
If that fails:
Option 2
Download iPhoto Library Manager and use its rebuild function. This will create a new library based on data in the albumdata.xml file. Not everything will be brought over - no slideshows, books or calendars, for instance - but it should get all your albums and keywords back.
Because this process creates an entirely new library and leaves your old one untouched, it is non-destructive, and if you're not happy with the results you can simply return to your old one. .
Regards
TD

I had iPhoto ask me to update and all my pictures disappeared. HELP!

I had iPhoto ask me to update and all my pictures disappeared. HELP! I am desperate, Thank you, Lindsay

We need to know more to be able to help, Lindsay.
Did you update to iPhoto 9.6?
And the photos vanished after you upgraded the iPhoto Library?
Did iPhoto crash during the upgrade?
Where is your iPhoto Library stored? Is it on your system drive in your Pictures folder or do you keep the iPhoto library on an external disk?
If the iPhoto Library is on your system drive in your Pictures folder, select the iPhoto Library in the Finder, ctrl-click or right-click it and select "Show Package Contents" from the pop-up menu. A Finder window will open, showing you, what is there inside your iPhoto Library.
Do you see folders "Masters" and "Old Masters"? If there is a folder "Old Masters", look inside. Are there any photos inside?

Pictures disappeared after installing Yosemite and new Iphoto. Why

Pictures disappeared after installing Yosemite and new Iphoto. Why ?

I also started having problems with iPhoto after installing Yosemite. Some of the Event collections lost the picture and just has a grey square in its place. When I click on the Event, it shows a white dotted lined square for each picture and if I click on the picture, it shows an exclamation mark.
Check, if you also are having a folder "Old Masters" inside the iPhoto Library package, as described by Muhamad Abdulkadir.
Ctrl-click (or right-click) your iPhoto Library in the Pictures folder , then select "Show Package Contents". If you are seeing a folder "Old Masters", copy this folder out of the library. Look inside - are the original image files of the problematic photos inside?
Are any photos in your "Masters"folder?

Pictures disappear from iphoto

My newly downloaded pictures disappear from iphoto within 48 hours. Any advice?

There are 9 different versions of iPhoto and they run on 9 different versions of the Operating System. The tricks and tips for dealing with issues vary depending on the version of iPhoto and the version of the OS. So to get help you need to give as much information as you can. Include things like:
- What version of iPhoto.
- What version of the Operating System.
- Details. As full a description of the problem as you can. For example, if you have a problem with exporting, then explain by describing how you are trying to export, and so on.
- History: Is this going on long? Has anything been installed or deleted? - Are there error messages?
- What steps have you tried already to solve the issue.
- Anything unusual about your set up? Or how you use iPhoto?
Anything else you can think of that might help someone understand the problem you have.

Videos not playing in iphoto with quick time/// pictures disappearing for good..

upgraded to snow leopard. I used to be able to double click on my videos in Iphoto and they would start playing in quicktime. Now when i double click my videos, its not even acknowledged that i double clicked them at all. my video ONLY plays if i drag and drop the video on my desktop then double click. ALSO, when i merge photo events together in my iphoto or just move them around in iphoto they disappear and i cant find them anymore, forcing me to get out my time machine an back up to when i had those photos again... and i heard that iphoto 11 is not a good buy.. please help on this too thank you..

well nevermind anyway... i bought LION and ILIFE11..... things seem to be in shape now...

My iPhoto pictures have disappeared

my iphoto pictures are gone vorm my computer and iphone

If you're ruinning Mavericks you will need to run one of the versions of iPhoto shown in this screenshot as compatible with Mavericks:
If your version is one of those shown as not compatible with Mavericks you'll have to upgrade iPhoto to 9.5.1 thru the App Store. I might be free or not, dependiung on the version.
OT

Some iPhoto pictures missing after time machine recovery, were there errors reported during backup that I missed?

Hello. I used time machine/time capsule to automatically back up my sytem over the last 3 years and I used the backups to recover my system to a new hard drive when the original drive began to fail. After recovery, I noticed there are missing photos in iPhoto.
I'm curios where I should look to see why they weren't backed up, and why it wasn't obvious to me at the time that they weren't backed up.
Does time machine explicitly call out issues when it can't back up a file or does it just squirrel a message away in the system log?
I'd like to know because I'd like avoid this issue going forward.
Full disclosure & History -
The hard drive on my late 2009 27" iMac was exhibiting issues and started to go bad. No problem I thought, I'll get a new one and recover the system from my time capsule.
The full recovery was initiated from the OS install media. Upon recovery, the system wouldn't boot. After booting from the OS install media and reinstalling the OS on top of the recovered data the system booted and seemed to retain almost everything. This may not be the best way to recover but it seemed to work.
I additionally had to:
repatch the OS
reinstall iWork
relicense MS Office (otherwise office seemed to be intact)
When I started looking through my iPhoto libraries, there were some events with no pictures (mostly the newer events). I couldn't find the pictures on the time capsule either so I'm curios if there was anyway I could have known that backups weren't completing successfully. I had run a time machine incremental backup before pulling out the old hard drive and it seemed to complete successfully so I'm at a loss. I can understand that as the hard drive began to fail, there may have been issues backing up the data, but I somehow missed it if/when the problems were reported.
Should I go through the old system logs that were backed up on the time capsule and look for backupd messages/errors? Going forward, how do I know if there are backup issues?
It took me a couple weeks to realize the drive was failing. I had noticed that the system performance was getting bad, and the system would occassionally hang. It would come back OK after a restart. I thought it was because the filesystem was getting close to full (30GB left on a 1 TB drive) so I was chasing down cleaning up some data to make more room. There were suggestions in other forums to try and keep the filesystem 10% free.
While moving data from the internal drive to a new external drive (to free up space) the system would hang. I eventually found a couple disk0 errors in the kernel log and I actually witnessed disk0 disappear while running an iostat. I'm thinking it took me too long to know the disk was going bad, and so the pictures I imported over the last 3-4 weeks may be gone.
I still have the original drive so I'll see if anything else can be salvaged from it.
Looking for some suggestions on
1) the ability to know if time machine backups are successful and are in sync with my system
2) the ability to know when there are hardware issues that I should be aware of
If you got to this point, thanks for taking the time to read through all this.
Regards,
-mike

Hi Mike,
I just saw this post and saw no one has responded. You might have figured out but in case, I wanted to let you know what I found out. I had the same problem. Hard drive failure, they installed a new one and my iPhoto pictures were missing. I couldn't find them on Time Machine either which baffled (and frustrated) me b/c I just backed up my drive and I was missing pictures from over a year ago.
I found this article and it allowed me to at least find my pictures...so they weren't lost after all.
https://discussions.apple.com/message/16029742#16029742
As for why they aren't showing up in iPhoto or Time Machine, the lady at the Mac store said it is probably an OS conflict. Which makes sense since I can see the actual pictures in the iPhoto content file (per the article mentioned above). However, I didn't have my computer with me at the store to have a Genius person help me resolve the conflict.
BUT, if you can find the pictures, then maybe you can reimport them into iPhoto? Just a thought.
Good luck!

I lost all of my iPhoto pictures i think. when i click on iPhoto it says "which photo library do you want iPhoto to use"

the version of my laptop is 10.8.5
there is no photo library anywhere on my computer
the "pictures" folder only has a "photo booth library" which i am not concerned with
i believe this has happened before (couple of months ago) but I'm not sure how i handled it and if it was the exact same situation
bottom line is that something pops up when i click on iPhoto and there is not photo library to choose from.
please help!!

What happened between yesterday and now? Did you update software? Install new software?
Did you run new software, for example cleaning applications?
Can it be, that you are now signed into your Mac from a different user account?
Spotlight will not search everywhere.
Search with Find Any File for iPhoto Libraries - download Find Any File here: The trial is free:
http://apps.tempel.org/FindAnyFile/index.htmlhttp://apps.tempel.org/FindAnyFile/index.php
You can search everywhere with FindAnyFile, where Spotlight will not search.
I learned this from Old Toad , see his post here:
Re: My iPhoto Library disappeared...how do I get it back?
Download and run Find Any File to search for a file with "ThumbJPGSegment" in the file name. These are files common to all versions of iPhoto libraries.
FAF can search areas that Spotlight can't like invisible folders, system folders and packages. If there's a library hiding somewhere on your hard drive FAF will find it.

90% of pictures disappeared after new program. Time machine folders mostly empty. Downloaded my Carbonite file. Can I restore directly from this file or do I have to drag and drop 20,000 pix?

90% of pictures disappeared after adding Maverick. My Time Machine folders were in the right order but mostly empty so useless for restore. Repair and rebuild attempts were not effective. Downloaded my Carbonite file which is now sitting on my desktop. Is there any way to use the restore command to rebuild my portfolio or do I have to drag & drop approx 20,000 pictures? Can album groupings and faces be retained?

Do you still have the original library that was present at the time you upgraded to Mavericks? If so apply the two fixes below in order as needed:
Fix #1
1 - launch iPhoto with the Command+Option keys held down and rebuild the library.
2 - run Option #4 to rebuild the database.
Fix #2
Using iPhoto Library Manager to Rebuild Your iPhoto Library
1 - download iPhoto Library Manager and launch.
2 - click on the Add Library button and select the library you want to add in the selection window..
3 - Now that the library is listed in the left hand pane of iPLM, click on your library and go to the Library ➙ Rebuild Library menu option.
4 - In the next window name the new library and select the location you want it to be placed.
5 - Click on the Create button.
Note: This creates a new library based on the LIbraryData.xml file in the library and will recover Events, Albums, keywords, titles and comments but not books, calendars or slideshows. The original library will be left untouched for further attempts at fixing the problem or in case the rebuilt library is not satisfactory.
Happy Holidays

Custom desktop picture disappears after restart

Ever since I purchased my MacBook Pro my custom desktop picture disappears after a restart. I select a photo either from the internet or my iphoto library and when I reboot the computer it goes back to the original desktop pattern, my photo is gone. Has anybody noticed the same problem on theirs and if so, have you found a solution? Its not a big deal, mostly goes under 'curious why this happens and how can I fix it' category . . .

Try running the combo update.
10.9.4 Combo Update
If that doesn't work, go to Finder and select your user/home folder. With that Finder window as the front window, either select Finder/View/Show View options or go command - J. When the View options opens, check ’Show Library Folder’. That should make your user library folder visible in your user/home folder. Select Preferences/com.apple.desktop.plist. Move the .plist to your desktop.
Restart and test. If it works okay, delete the plist from the desktop.
If the same, return the .plist to where you got it from, overwriting the newer one.
Thanks to leonie for some information contained in this.
You might need to redo the View settings after an update.

Picture disappears in Forwarded and "Send Again" email messages

I can't quite figure out this behavior.
Sometimes (not all the time) if I try resending an email with an embedded picture the picture disappears and is replaced by the '?' in a box icon. (This occurs even though the picture shows up fine in the preview pane).
I think this only occurs with pictures I sent via iPhoto's "Email" function.
Thanks.

it possible that if there is any ora- message in the
trace file database send it to my e-mail.??Yes, it is possible. On Unix/Linux, it is easy to set.
On windows not sure how to do that.
Cheer,
Virag

My iPhotos have disappeared completely. How do I get iPhoto back?

My iPhotos have disappeared completely. How do I get iPhoto back?

1. Your Library should be in the Pictures Folder, not the Applications folder. Are you sure that you're not looking at the Application?
2. If it is in the wring folder, move it to the Pictures folder. That's inly in the case of the Library not the application.
3.
Couple of things to try:
Restart your mac and try launch iPhoto again.
If that fails:
Go to your Pictures Folder and find the iPhoto Library there. Right (or Control-) Click on the icon and select 'Show Package Contents'. A finder window will open with the Library exposed.
Look there for a file called ‘iPhoto’Lock.data or similar. Drag it to the Desktop. Make no other changes. Start iPhoto. Does that help?
If not: Where is your iPhoto Library stored? If it's on an External Disk, what format is that?

IPhoto pictures disappeared?

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