Lost iPhoto Pictures

Wondering if anyone can help me on this.....last night, I turned on my LaCie hard drive where I store all my photos on iPhoto. For some reason, a portion of my photo library has disappeared. The last pictures I have in iPhoto are from July 2009, even though I have scanned and loaded hundreds of pictures since then.
Any idea what might have happened and how I might recover these photos?
Thanks for your help.

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

Similar Messages

After an iPhoto upgrade - Lost iPhoto Pictures - HELP!

I was trying to transfer my photos from my Mac Air to my new Mac Book Pro and it did not seem to work. When I went back to my Air - I opened iPhoto and it told me to either update or quit. If I quit - I could do nothing When I hit update - I lost all my photos! Please help!
I am working on maverick for both devices.

I was trying to transfer my photos from my Mac Air to my new Mac Book Pro and it did not seem to work. When I went back to my Air - I opened iPhoto and it told me to either update or quit.
How did you transfer? Did you by any chance try to use a cloud storage for that and put your library into Dropbox folder or similar? Otherwise it is weird that trying to transfer from one mac to another would corrupt the original library.

Lost iPhoto pictures during transfer.

Here is the deal, my friends macbook pro needed to be upgraded from 10.5 to 10.6. I wanted to do A full upgrade because he was having some issues. I created a new partition on the main drive and installed snow leopard (with the leopard partition untouched) I then used the migration assistant to transfer everything to the snow leopard install. It transferred everything EXCEPT his iphoto library. But it deleted it on the old leopard install as well! (as if it transferred it). He said they were on his ipod, and I got some software to take them off his ipod without itunes since itunes HAS to sync. And as soon as i plugged it in, itunes started syncing the ipod, so i told it to stop, but it was too late and now all the photos are gone off his ipod.
Is there any software that can recover photos deleted off the ipod or even the old leopard partition?
So much for Apple being easy and "just working". Never gonna use the migration assistant again. Il just manually back up files or use carbon copy cloner.
I am going to feel SO bad if the pics are gone.

Welcome to Apple Discussions
Check out http://macintosh-data-recovery.com/

Rescuing lost iphoto pictures

Is there a way to recover a deleted iphoto album that has been emptied from the trash? is there a program that can recover these files in less than 24 hours?
p.s. preferbly free

No free ones. You'll need a File Recovery app like File Salvage
Or, restore from your back up, right?
Regards
TD

HT1338 lost iphoto. Pictures in Library yet no iPhoto

Lost iPhoto. Photos in iMac Library yet iPhoto icon lost. Start Up Disk Full. Moved iTunes to Seagate External. May have deleted iPhoto in the process. Time Capsule as Back up Seagate as external drive to free up iMac storage.

Just ran into the same problem myself and am looking for a solution. I'll let you know if I find anything
Answer may be in this thread.
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=9745761&#9745761
I'm going to try reapplying it to see if it works.
Message was edited by: Kyn Drake

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!

Lost iPhoto Library due to system wipe

I had to wipe my Mac due to a hard drive problem. I lost all of my iPhoto pictures from a year back in time. I had iCloud turned off on my phone because I didn't like how every single picture (even deleted pictures) were added to my library. My photo stream was only able to recover photos from the last 30 days (doesn't really help much). Surely there is a way to get all of my pictures back since I use my Apple ID to log onto iPhoto.
If someone could help me it would be greatly appreciated!

Not the answer you are looking for but I had to have a complete rebuild having deleted the iMac from 'Find my iPhone" and lost everything. It cost me £440 to restore but I got all of my photos back, 8700, + a further 150,000 images of every item I had looked at on the internet. Spent the last 3 months deleting unwanted images every night. There is a way therefore but costly.

Any value in exporting iPhoto pictures and importing them into Aperture?

I am moving from iPhoto into Aperture (moving my library again actually) and I know that iPhoto and Aperture can share the iPhoto library once it has been updated but I am wondering if there is any value (or even if it is possible) to export all of the iPhoto pictures and import them into a new Aperture library? The reason that I'm asking this is that I know there are a lot of duplicates in my iPhoto library and I know that Aperture keeps only the original. A couple of weeks ago I moved my iPhoto library onto an external LaCie SSD disk to use with my MacBook Pro but unfortunately corrupted that library and have to make the move again. If there is any value in changing how I'm managing my library I should do it now.
The library corruption was caused by me needing to leave for work and disconnecting the LaCie before Aperture was done sync'ing with my Flickr account. When I tried to use Aperture the next day it was not able to repair/rebuild or use the iPhoto library at all. I was unfortunately not backing up the external disk so I lost everything that I had done to clean up the library after the move. One lesson that I learned was do not automatically sync with Flickr because doing this on an MBP via wireless with an external disk library can add a lot of delay to shutting down Aperture after an MBP wakeup.

Just in case you have not come across these:
Aperture 3.3: Using a unified photo library with iPhoto and Aperture
Aperture 3.3: How to use Aperture to merge iPhoto libraries
but I am wondering if there is any value (or even if it is possible) to export all of the iPhoto pictures and import them into a new Aperture library?
You can - an it will depend on what you want to achieve, if that will usefull. The way to do this would be by imprting your iPhoto library into an Aperture library using Aperture. But Aperture libraries and iPhoto libraries are now interchangable - both are photo libraries, and you could simply use your iPhoto library in Aperture and be done now.
Some reasons why you would want to turn your iPhoto library into a library recognized as Aperture library by importing it into a new, empty Aperture Library:
As long as the photo library will have the "Kind: iPhoto library", you will have to upgrade both iPhoto and Aperture always to the newest versions, or you will not be able to upgrade to a new library format, when a new release of Aperture comes - say (iPhoto '12 and Aperture 4); you will probably have to buy both new releases to continue working with your iPhoto Library in Aperture.
If the kind of your library is "Kind: iPhoto library", it will appear in the Media Browser in the iPhoto section, not in the Aperture section, even if you are using it as your Aperture library. And before syncing with iTunes you will always have to open the Aperture library in iPhoto to point iTunes to it.
Also, in Aperture you have more control about what will be included in your library - In iPhoto there is no way to specify the size and quality of previews. If you do not want or need previews, or you want smaller previews, or no Faces, it would make sense to recreate your iPhoto library by importing it into a new, empty Aperture Library.
If you have more than one iPhoto Library, you can merge them into one big Aperture library to be able to browse all your images without having to switch between libraries. Aperture works very well with really big libraries. There is no need to split libraries.
The reason that I'm asking this is that I know there are a lot of duplicates in my iPhoto library and I know that Aperture keeps only the original.
That is what I meant by having more control on what will be stored. iPhoto will always store a very high quality preview of your edited version; in Aperture you can decide what the preview size and quality will be. But Previews and originals are not duplicates; they are not the same image.
Regards
Léonie

Screensaver configuration problem with lost iPhoto library

Hi, I justed switched my macbook and I used to have another iPhoto library in an external HD that is now gone. I cannot configure the screensaver, I think it searches for my lost iPhoto library and cannot select my current pictures. Can someone help me with this problem? Thanks.

If the rebuild doesn't help try Fix 101: make a temporary, backup copy of the library if you don't already have a backup copy and try the following:
1 - delete the iPhoto preference file, com.apple.iPhoto.plist, that resides in your
User/Home()/Library/ Preferences folder.
2 - delete iPhoto's cache file, Cache.db, that is located in your
User/Home()/Library/Caches/com.apple.iPhoto folder.
3 - 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 down the Option key when launching iPhoto. You'll also have to reset the iPhoto's various preferences.
OT

I used the Migration Assistant to move data from my Time Machine to my new Mac.   Most data has been moved successfully but none of my iPhoto pictures have been moved.   Looking at my Time Machine now I find that the earliest back-up is dated after the Mi

I used the Migration Assistant to move data from my Time Machine to my new Mac.   Most data seems to have been transferred successfully but none of my iPhoto pictures have been transferred.
My Time Machine now shows the earliest available Back-up to be after the Migration Date.   My iPhoto pictures seem to have either been lost in the migration process or are locked in my Time Machine prior to the earliest back-up date now accessible.
Any advice on recovering my old iPhoto pictures would be greatly appreciated.

First go to iPhoto Preferences, look in both General and Advanced tabs to make sure that things are set to import from camera into iPhoto.
Then if that doesn't help, connect the camera and open Image Capture in your Applications > Utilities folder and see if you can use Image Capture to reset the import path from the camera to iPhoto.
Image Capture: Free import tool on Mac OS X - Macgasm
Message was edited by: den.thed
Sorry John, I didn't see your post when I clicked the reply button. Dennis

Lion ScreenSaver re-active hang during read my iPhoto pictures

Hi,
My Lion cannot display password logon during screensaver is reading my iPhoto pictures.
Because I setup my screensaver to random display my iPhoto pictures.
I have an external monitor with my MacBook. Both of my monitors will display iPhoto pictures with screensaver.
Screen hang if i'd like to re-active from screensaver to normal operation mode.
That will be fine if screensaver reads iPhoto pictures and start to display them.
Hang status happen during screensaver still reading iPhoto pictures for 2~3 seconds and before display them.
Please check what's happen with this kind of issue for current Lion OS X 10.7.3
Many thanks

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!

My iPad 3 has lost photostream pictures

my iPad 3 lost contact to photo stream today. it worked before, however,
it started with not adding the new pictures and finally it lost all pictures, now showing an empty photo stream.
it happened while using iPhoto for iOS in parallel to the photo app.
who can help solving this problem?

Hi everyone,
Well, in my case, the photostream did start working, insofar that any 'new' photos I take are populating into the photostream. However, the ten photos that did not transfer into the photostream yesterday, which I took between 5pm and 6pm, have still NOT transferred into the photostream. Since several new photos, taken after those 10 photos, have transferred to the photostream, I've given up hope that those ten will transfer.
Now I have to manually hook up the iPad to my macbook to transfer those photos as they are pictures of my three children and two of their cousins that I captured during a birthday party for my youngest (he turned four yesterday).
A friend mentioned that he once experienced photos not transferring where he had taken several photos in very quick succession. Indeed, that's similar to my situation (all ten photos were taken in under a minute).
Glad it's working for all of you now.
Regards,
Russ

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

I lost my pictures about 10 days ago butt If I do restore All I just can go 5 days before how can I go further back to get me pictures back

I lost my pictures about 10 days ago butt If I do restore All I just can go 5 days before how can I go further back to get me pictures back

we see your problem, but know nothing else...
Quoted from  Apple's "How to write a good question"
To help other members answer your question, give as many details as you can.
Include your product name and specs such as processor speed, memory, and storage capacity. Please do not include your Serial Number, IMEI, MEID, or other personal information.
Provide the version numbers of your operating system and relevant applications, for example "iOS 6.0.3" or "iPhoto 9.1.2".
Describe the problem, and include any details about what seems to cause it.
List any troubleshooting steps you've already tried, or temporary fixes you've discovered.

Macbook pro had to be wiped out and I lost iPhoto (was free on the computer when I first bought it). Re-bought iPhoto but I can't find/get my photos. Now what?

macbook pro had to be wiped out and I lost iPhoto (was free on the computer when I first bought it). Re-bought iPhoto but I can't find/get my photos. Now what?

Re-bought iPhoto but I can't find/get my photos. Now what?
iPhoto stores your photos in the iPhoto Library, by default it is in your Pictures folder. Double-click the iPhoto Library in "Pictures". Did you restore your documents and data, including the Pictures folder from your backup after the drive has been wiped?

Lost iPhoto Pictures

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for