iPhoto LIbrary missing after Snow Leopard upgrade MISSING FROM TimeCapsule!

I am sure that you know they are gone, but have you tried to search on some photo file names that you recall? I quit using backups such that I could not extract specific thing long ago. I like drag and drop. I am assuming that you installed 10.6 on a machine that will support it.

Message was edited by: donv (The Ghost)

I have the exact same problem. Macbook Air, backed up with Time machine right before starting Snow Leopard upgrade. Iphoto Library was perfectly fine before upgrade.

After upgrade, I have zero photos in iPhoto, and they are not anywhere on the hard drive. Hard drive was at 49.5G of used memory prior to upgrade, after upgrade it is at 17.62 G used memory.

I figure no problem, open up time machine, no photos exist on the drive. They were there before the upgrade, I actually went into time machine and checked to make sure prior to the upgrade.

Talk to Apple support and they have no clue.

I am furious, six years of pictures of my 6 year old and 2 year old were on this computer and backed up daily. Now they are gone.

I am curious, was your iphoto library named "iphoto library" or something different, I had changed the name of mine to "James Photos." Just wondering if that has something to do with it.

Considering reformatting my Air and installing Leopard to see if I can view them on the older OS. Got an appointment Sunday at the Genius Bar, maybe they can help but I am afraid I know the answer to this problem and it is that our photos have been deleted.

I have the same problem. I was doing a SuperDuper backup and it was complaining that it wasn't there so I started looking for it manually. I just woke up so I figure I wasn't seeing it on being blurry eyed but now it's just full on panic. For the record, the iphoto lib was not on my boot drive, so it shouldn't have been affected by the upgrade to 10.6.

Same problem here. Current iPhoto library was on my hard drive. After upgrade to 10.6, iPhoto library cannot be found. Start to panic. Go to my time machine backup, no evidence of iPhoto library in any backup going back a year. Call Apple. First guy is stumped. Moves me to a second guy who is of a higher level. He captures all of my desktop information and then sends it to Apple engineering and the iPhoto application department. I was told to do nothing until hearing back from them. I am to call Wednesday September 9th if I haven't heard back. I have a little bit of hope, as the 10.6 upgrade would have had no connection to my time machine backup which is done by me manually on an external drive that was not connected during the upgrade. Will post back, if I ever hear anything helpful.

After reviewing several of my back ups on different off line HD's to make sure I wasn't completely at a loss, I did find a copy I made back in march on my media center mini (THANK GOODNESS) that weighs in at a hefty 300 GB. I'm glad I didn't go ahead and and install 10.6 on that one as well since this has all my photos since going digital almost 9 years ago.

Hopefully Apple can resolve this issue soon.

I also have lost my whole iPhoto Library with the installation of Snow Leopard. Is not on my time Capsule either... Ouch!!!

Whew, reading this was a bit scary, especially with so many people reporting it. I immediately launched iphoto and mine were all there.

I also have all the photos synced to my iphone so I guess even if the computer lost the pictures, maybe they would have gotten synced back from the phone? Just a thought.

Update: While my iPhoto Library is missing, my daughters iphoto is intact after the upgrade. I needed to reclaim space when I did my upgrade to get the required 7g (which I didn't need to do for my daughter). I took off some movie files to get enough space and I now have around 60g free on my machine. Had around 5000 pics in my Library... so that would work out to around 50g or more. Also had a lot of Rosetta upgrade messages when I did the install. Just wanted to add some details of my situation to see if anyone else had similar experience.

Any word back from Apple (engineers or otherwise) on the missing iPhoto libraries? I updated our MacBook from 10.5 to 10.6 last night and all of our photos from 11/07 on have vanished. This corresponds to the date I purchased the current MacBook and of course, is close to the birth date of my two year old. Obviously, I am also furious that it looks like I've lost all of our photos of our only daugter. I also have a time machine back-up, but the folks at the Apple Store in Oak Brook thus far have been unable to find any indication of any additional photos on my dedicated back-up drive, suggesting that the iPhoto has never been backed up properly (the time machine back up drive has been in use for approx 1.5-years). I am amazed that this type of issue has occurred. Taking the Apple Genius' best guess of the situation, there appear to be at least two serious flaws: ℹ the 10.6 upgrade causes of significant loss of data (drive went from approx 7GB free to 52GB free), and (ii) Time Machine has never properly backed up the data in the first instance.
The Apple Genius just called again and wanted to give up, but as a last gasp, I convinced them to restore the whole 10.5 install off the drive, in hopes that 10.5 might recognize the library where 10.6 cannot. Given my understanding that Time Machine was supposed to back-up the whole drive, I have faint hopes this might work.

VERY VERY DISAPOINTED

As most of you in this thread, I upgraded to Snow Leopard and lost my iPhoto Library. I was able to rescue an old, back-up I had restored back in February and kept in my desktop out of luck. Time Capsule has been worthless, as it keeps giving me the history on the old, restored backup, file but absolutely nothing on the iPhoto Library I was actually using and updating. There are thousands of pictures and videos that I can no longer find, including a boat load of pictures I downloaded to the computer three days before the upgrade.

I've been to the "Genius Bar" three times and have gotten nowhere.

Truly hope Apple has caught on to this thread, finds a fix for this terrible problem and quickly trains its geniuses properly so that they can help us all.

Do any of you recall whether you habitually had iPhoto running while Time Machine was running? There is a MacInTouch Reader Report stating that Time Machine did not back up the iPhoto library if the iPhoto application was running in versions prior to 10.5.7:

http://www.macintouch.com/readerreports/leopard/topic4685.html#d30apr2009

I do not know whether the problem was fixed in Mac OS X 10.5.7.

This problem is relevant only if you migrated data from the Time Machine volume to a new installation of Snow Leopard. If you did not, it might be worth using the Console application (in Applications/Utilities) to see if the install.log file (under Private/var/log) shows any errors when the user data was updated during the installation.