Networked Drive: An error occurred while trying to save your photo library

iPhoto 7.02 update did not fix my problem. Selected around 50 photos and decided to make them into an event. After the even was created I still received the error saying that it could not be saved or certain things may not have gotten saved.

This is either permissions or you are opening your old iphoto album (as opposed to the new relocated one).

Hold down "option" when you fire up iphoto and make sure that you are selecting the iphoto library on the external HD/network drive, not the old library that was copied.

If you are selecting the proper photo library, it's probably permissions. Make sure that you own the new library and have proper permissions.

This is happening to me as well on an external harddrive. This is ridiculous and completely unacceptable. Why isn't there a solution to this yet.

I see this also. I have my iPhoto library on the root drive of a PowerPC mac mini. No problems editing it locally on that machine, but I see the error when I open the iPhoto library over a AFS share on my Mac Pro.

It also seems like the error only shows up when I modify events (usually when modifying their title). I'm able to edit photos for hours and hours without an issue.

Also while it reports that some recent changes may be lost - I haven't see any of my changes lost.

Yes, my iPhoto library was upgraded from the previous iPhoto.

I also have this issue. Library is on an external drive as with other users. This makes iPhoto completely unusable and is a real dissapointment after using iPhoto 07 since it was launched trouble-free. Its a real pain to 'upgrade' to a newer version of software only for it to be completely useless. What's worse is that I can't go back to the old iPhoto due to the library file upgrade.

Apple - when will this be fixed ? I've been waiting for weeks for a patch to improve this and it hasn't come.

Same here and this seems to be caused by a problem with the journaling code that iPhoto uses to write to it's gallery.

The cause of this problem (except for the problem in iPhoto itself) is high latency between iPhoto and the disk that contains the library. Wireless connections are high latency and heavily loaded fileservers are also high latency.

The first problem is 'fixable' by switching from wireless to a wired connection 🙂
The second problem depends on your fileserver but there is another bug in iPhoto that causes your fileserver to go berzerk:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1082091
iPhoto starts a Spotlight index on the volume that contains the iPhoto library which uses a LOT of CPU/disk on the fileserver. The only way to work around this is by disabling Spotlight completely (SPOTLIGHT=-NO- in /etc/hostconfig and reboot).

Let's hope that Apple will be quick with releasing iPhoto 7.0.3 and please report these problems to Apple. Hopefully that will increase the priority on their bugs list 🙂

I read post a couple of days ago stating that by removing the journaling fixed the problem for that user. However, the only way I've found to "un-journal" a drive is to reformat. You can add journaling without reformatting but not the other way around as far as I can tell. Also make sure ownership is set to be ignored if you already haven't done so.

iPhoto seems to have implemented it's own journaling system. It has a file that contains the changes made to the Library ('title ... changed to ...', 'keyword ... added' that haven't been written to the library yet. This is completely independent from the filesystem journal (at least while using a network drive).

My guess is that the journalling causes quite a bit more fileaccesses (updates require almost twices as much disk access with the journal file) and that iPhoto can't really deal with a journal file that is slightly out of date because of high latency or a busy disk/server. In either case I question if disabling journaling is a smart idea because the primary function of the journal is protecting the Library file (AlbumData.xml) from getting corrupted.

Bart:

Thanks for the info. Do you think putting the iPhoto library on the Privacy/no index list in the Spotlight system preferences would work instead of turning off Spotlight entirely?

Has anyone been able to resolve this? I haven't been able to add any pictures to my library and actually lost a TON of pictures because they looked like they were added to the library. I stupidly ignored the error for too long and then when I rebooted, none of my pictures were there. This problem just started for me about a month ago!! Does anyone have any work-arounds until this issue is fixed??

I also use an external hard drive for my library and it won't even let me move it. It keeps saying that there was an error and it couldn't move the library when I try to move it to my desktop to see if that resolves the issue.

I have submitted a bug report and I hope others will do the same to get some more exposure on this problem.

FYI: This issue is solved in Leopard.

Actually, i had never had an issue with iphoto 08 until i upgraded to leopard. Now i have this error

I had this problem using my new iMac and iPhoto '08. I have a PC running Windows XP Pro as my server and I'm keeping my iTunes and iPhoto libraries on a shared drive that acts as a server. Using my new iMac I could not get the iPhoto library to work over the server as I would get the above error every time I added a photo to the library. However, I updated the iMac to Leopard and now the problem appears to have disappeared. iPhoto is now working great over a networked server accross PC and Macs.

I was able to get this to work.
What I was trying to do was move my iphoto library to users/shared so my wife and I could both work off the same library. I moved it to shared and set the access permissions for wife and my account to read/write. I then deleted the iphoto libraries out of the home/pictures of both our accounts. After starting iPhoto in both user accounts I redirected the library to the shared folder..library. The above error dialog appeared after a few seconds of use. I looked at the library permissions and besides the two if us there are 2 other permission users, Everyone and wheel (anyone know what wheel is?). Those had permissions set to read only. After I set the everyone permissions to read/write the error went away. This is a temporary solution in my book as I want to protect the kids from deleting photos.
Hope this helps others ....