IPhoto's Pictures Forever Lost – Help!

Question

Hello to all,
I am afraid that I have quite a sad and seemingly hopeless story to share with you, upon this cold and dreary Winter's day. My story begins some time ago, when I sold my 20" iMac and upgraded to a brand new 21". You might ask what sadness could be associated with such a splendid upgrade? I will share this and more with you, dear reader, but you must be patient. Well, before I sold my 20" I backed up my entire computer using none other than Apple's very own Time Machine. However, this is where I failed, and this is where my story takes a sad and bitter turn. With my 20" sold and gone, I purchased a 21" from the local classifieds. Oh what a beautiful machine! I eagerly migrated everything over from my backup, and for awhile it seemed I was in technological bliss. Everything was there, my music, my movies, my applications, my photos...huh?...what's this??? One day my wife was looking through some photos in iPhoto and she met the infamous exclamation point. For those who have never encountered this villain, it shows up when your cached thumbnails fail to link back to the actual pictures. I had met this adversary before, and had defeated him. This time however, his villainous plot was far darker than I could have imagined. When my wife showed me, I thought I would be her knight and shining armor and banish the dark exclamation point forever. I opened up the contents of the iPhoto library, and to my shock and dismay, many (actually most) of the originals were gone. I searched for invisible (hidden) files, but still they were missing. How could this be? It seems that Time Machine is the true villain and the exclamation point is only one of its henchmen. I have searched the web for hours, nay even days for help. I have searched my computer to its very frameworks, all to no avail. They are gone...forever. In desperation I called the technical support of my favorite company. Yes, I called Apple. Off the record I was told that Time Machine cannot be trusted for such important things. I was further advised that in the future I actually need to manually copy over my important files such as movies, music, documents, and yes, photos. It seems shameful that a program who's entire purpose is to safeguard your precious data, cannot successfully complete its reason for being. I have long abandoned this failure of a program, and I am now quite happy with Carbon Copy Cloner. But this does not bring back my precious photos. These are irreplaceable. They are those precious times with my wife, my two precious children, and my relatives. I have been told that this is hopeless, that all is lost. Yet, I will not give up. I have come to terms with the fact that the full quality pictures are lost. But I hold out hope that I would be able to somehow get the pictures back (even if they be lower quality) through the cached thumbnails. I have tried taking screenshots, but they are so low quality (only 72dpi). I had seen people use a very high resolution digital camera and take photos of printed pictures, instead of scanning them in, so I thought this might work. The pictures are just too blurry when I take them of the screen, using a 8MegaPixel Sony camera. I have truly reached the end of my capabilities.
I send this plea out to all who have a heart, that they will try to help me come up with a viable solution. My wife gets tears in her eyes every time we talk of them possibly never coming back. You will be my hero, and hers if you can come up with some way of using those cached files. I am very willing to listen to suggestions. PLEASE HELP ME.

Answer 1

Open your iPhoto library with the Finder like this:
Click to view full size
Next open the folder named "Masters" and see if the subfolder there contain your image file. If they do, close the library package, make a copy and try the three fixes below in order as needed:
Fix #1
1 - delete the iPhoto preference file, com.apple.iPhoto.plist, that resides in your User/Library/Preferences folder.
2 - delete iPhoto's cache files that are located in the User/Library/Caches/com.apple.iPhoto folder.
3 - reboot, launch iPhoto and try again.
NOTE: If you're moved your library from its default location in your Home/Pictures folder you will have to point iPhoto to its new location when you next open iPhoto by holding the the Option key. You'll also have to reset the iPhoto's various preferences.
Fix #2
Launch iPhoto with the Command+Option keys depressed and follow the instructions to rebuild the library. Select options #1, #2 and #6.
Click to view full size
Fix #3
Rebuild the library using iPhoto Library Manager as follows:
Using iPhoto Library Manager to Rebuild Your iPhoto Library
1 -Download iPhoto Library Manager and launch.
2 -Click on the Add Library button, navigate to your User/Pictures folder and select your iPhoto Library folder.
3 - Now that the library is listed in the left hand pane of iPLM, click on your library and go to the File->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.
If the subfolders in the Masters folder do not contain your photos you'll either need to have a backup copy of the library that contains the files or use a file recovery application like SubrosaSoft FileSalvage to try to recover them.
In the future it's best to use paragraphs in your post to separate information and make it easier to read. Like Terence I gave up on line 3 and this response is based on what I think happened.