Old iphoto library and time machine

Waltster6565 wrote:

I have an old mac (iMac circa 2007), currently running El Capitan 10.11.6.

I have an old external drive that I used as my time machine back-up back in 2015.

...

You have to tell Time Machine open this old drive, directly when you launch Time Machine - use the "Browse other backups" option. Usually Time Machine will open from your current backup drive, when you enter Time Machine. To get to "Browse other backups", hold down the Options key ⌥ when you enter Time Machine.

- but I don't know what else I could be doing wrong since opening Time Machine and selecting the external drive that contains the back-ups seems to be pretty straight forward.

But that's not what you're trying to restore. That's what you're trying to restore from. The trick is to go to *the thing you want to restore* and then let TM find the files it needs to do that task.

I'm not sure I have a solution, as I'm not especially knowledgeable on Time Machine (nor much else) but this:

I connected the old external drive and opened the Time Machine. I selected the external hard drive and I followed the path backups.backupdb>>imac>>2015-09-19-082030>>Mac HD>>USers>>ME>>Pictures>>iphoto Library

seems wrong to me. You're not asking it to restore a back up when you do that, but rather asking it to restore a back up of that back up, if you follow. In the ordinary usage of TM you would launch Time machine and go to

HD/Users/ME/Pictures

and then select the date and ask it to restore that. It then digs out the required files from the back up and restores the Pictures folder to the condition of that particular date.

What I'm not sure about is the ME... has you username changed in the intervening years? Will you have permissions issues? Best to try anyway and see what error messages it shows. Or maybe it will work :)

Hello Waltster6565,

Thank you for using Apple Support Communities. It's our understanding that the Restore button is greyed out when trying to restore your photos with Time Machine. We know photos can be extremely important. We're happy to help.

Take a look at the resource below to confirm that you have followed all appropriate steps to restore the photo library:

Restore a library from TIme Machine in Photos on Mac

If the issue persists, make sure that you have enough storage on your iMac to store the photo library.

How to free up storage space on your Mac

Let us know the results. Please include specific error messages and any other troubleshooting steps that you may have tried.

Have a great day!