TIF files all pixelated or 'small'

What are some typical file sizes (in KB or MB) for unaltered .tif files you've imported since the trouble began? How big are unaltered .tif files that you imported before then? If the recently-imported images are actually smaller and have much lower resolution (W x H, in pixels) as shown in iPhoto's Information pane, then I suspect you've inadvertently changed an image quality or image size setting on your camera.

Message was edited by: eww

Very, very odd!

Are the actual pixel dimensions of the images changing when you move them from one machine to the other?

When you enlarge a highly detailed portion of an image to 100% (pixel-for-pixel on the display) or larger on each machine, do the two displays look about the same? That is, has the image on the Leopard machine actually lost any of the detail that appears when you view that image on the Tiger machine?

If not, then the image's differing appearances under the two OSes may be due to a different approach in Leopard to rendering high-resolution images at the lower resolution of the Powerbook's display. Perhaps Leopard just uses different algorithms from the ones Tiger uses to turn, say, a 15-megapixel image into its own representation on a Powerbook's 1280 x 854 (1.09-megapixel) display. Of course whenever we look at one of our pictures at anything less than 100%, we are looking at a computer-generated (literally) stand-in for the real image. None of the pixels we see under those circumstances are in the original image file; some larger number of pixels has been "boiled down" in software to each single pixel we see, which represents the average of them.

Is the Powerbook that runs 10.4.x also running a different version of iPhoto from the 10.5.x Powerbook?

Interesting. Thanks for posting back to let us know what was going on.