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Hi
Please help! Following some online advice today, as I was having an issue sharing a movie, I deleted iMovie preferences only to find that all my projects have gone so iMovie is completely empty now. I had about 20 movies which I've painstakingly made over the years. I do have an external hard drive so I hope they'll be in there but not sure how to restore them? I'm not very techie so please bear with me on any advice!
Thank you in advance
Hi, maddyJJ,
Not to worry. When you do the delete preferences procedure iMovie opens in a new blank library. You only need to reopen your old library to get back to your projects. An easy way to do that is to go to your Movies folder on your Mac (Go/Home/Movies) and double click on your old library's icon to have iMovie open in that library.
Another way is to open iMovie while holding down only the Option key, and you will get a box that lets you choose or navigate to the library that you want to have iMovie open in.
A third way is to open iMovie and go to File/Open Library/Other and navigate to the library that you want to open in.
-- Rich
Hi, maddyJJ,
Not to worry. When you do the delete preferences procedure iMovie opens in a new blank library. You only need to reopen your old library to get back to your projects. An easy way to do that is to go to your Movies folder on your Mac (Go/Home/Movies) and double click on your old library's icon to have iMovie open in that library.
Another way is to open iMovie while holding down only the Option key, and you will get a box that lets you choose or navigate to the library that you want to have iMovie open in.
A third way is to open iMovie and go to File/Open Library/Other and navigate to the library that you want to open in.
-- Rich
Yes! I found the old library under 'new library' in Movies application so I've found them all again - fantastic. Thank you so much for your help Rich839. Do I need to tidy this up now - delete 'new' Movies file which is empty?
An added note: It is a good idea to keep at least one backup of your iMovie library on an external drive that is formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled). iMovie libraries can become corrupted, or your computer drive can go south, and in that case you wouldn't want to lose all of your projects. If you already have an external drive that you need to reformat to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) be aware that reformatting will erase all data on the drive. So before reformatting be sure to backup elsewhere any data that you want to keep.
-- Rich
All's well that end's well! :)
Yes, you can delete the blank library if you want, unless there is a project in it that you want to keep.
-- Rich
Wonderful. Thank you so much for dissolving my stress 😍
Happy I could help. :)
-- Rich
iMovie projects all lost!
