I've used the link feature in iphoto 08, so not to duplicate my photos (I also use lightroom and bridge). Now when I updated to iPhoto 09, the photos that were linked are now missing even though they're in the same place as before. On the same main hard drive in my Shared folder. How can I relink all my albums to the right folders and not one photo at a time? I can do this easily in both Lightroom and Expression Media but I found no option to just point to the right place in iPhoto 09.
TIA
Jeff
iMac intel dualCore aluminum,
Mac OS X (10.5.6),
4Gb RAM
That's one of the pitfalls of a referenced library, easily losing the links. I've found with the previous iPhoto version that if the linked files are on the boot drive, relinking one in an event will re-link all in that same folder. Otherwise you'll have to re-link each as they come up in your day to day use.
If you search the iPhoto 7 forum for "referenced library" you'll find numerous posts on the pitfalls of a referenced library. It's not recommended.
I had the exact same problem - and called Apple support and spoke to an expert, and at the end of the day there was nothing you could do, just rebuild the entire library manually (i.e. start from scratch and losing all your keepsakes, albums etc).
In my particular case, I kept my old library, and then copied the links from the newly created/rebuilt library (with the correct links) into the "Data" and "Originals" folders of the old library, then upgraded again... and then most of the links still worked. Unfortunately iPhoto 08 seemed to rename the subfolders in the "Originals" folder whenever you changed names of an event, and iPhoto 09 seems to just leave the old name, so there was a lot of renaming before it worked again.
iPhoto could be such a great app if it worked better with references - there should be a way to edit the links, make changes to the original (referenced) file, rename or move files in finder (just the way iTunes does it) - the way it's written now it's very bad. Everyone says "just do not use external references" but if you want to work with Windows/Parallels or any other image program you just want to know where your original file is and keep manual control of the folder structure, so that's not an option for me.
Apple developers: Please provide better support for referenced files, or allow more flexibility with the internal folder structure/naming!!!
No point in sending messages to Apple here. As I’m sure you recall from your careful reading of the Terms of Service you agreed to when you joined the Apple Discussions, this is a User to User forum. Apple aren’t here. They don’t promise to read anything here.
