Lost images after iPhoto was switched to Photos

The Queen B wrote: …I have been struggling with this problem since 2017.

Pretty complicated-- I feel your pain! Within the last several months I've had 3 SSDs and one mechanical drive go dead. After the first SSDs died (luckily I found nearly everything on other media,) I've backed up everything on extra drives. The whole thing is rather scary.

It sounds like you expect (or hope) that the iPhoto pictures are floating around someplace. The best thing to do is to follow léonie's advice and use Finder's Search field to hunt for the pictures. If searching for ".photolibrary" doesn't work, then you can search for individual pictures.

Here I've set up a search for "." since that includes all files. I've set it to search all the Mac for Image files created before 2018 and larger than 100 KB. (There are a lot of small trash pictures like icons and logos!) You can try 50 KB or something else and see what you get.

You can use the little + button to add more constraints. Finder doesn't look inside Photos Libraries-- I don't know about iPhoto Libraries.

Another alternative is to use the app Find Any File ($6) which can be even more selective, and it will look inside Libraries.

A Photos Library will overwhelm a search with filenames that make no sense, so here I've set a search in the Pictures folder for images before 2018 that are not in a photoslibrary. Even highly constrained searches like this may yield thousands pictures, so you will need to look though them with Quicklook using the spacebar to see if any are relevant.

Good luck!

I don't have my old Mac up and running at the moment – but you probably had iPhoto set to import photos into its library.

If this library was anything like the default Photos Library.photoslibrary which Photos uses, it probably was set up as a package. A macOS package is entire subdirectory tree that the Finder disguises as a single file, to discourage you from messing around inside, and possibly breaking some relationship between the contents that the Mac relies upon. Macs often use packages to hold

• Applications
• Media (music, movie, TV show) libraries
• Photo libraries

My guess is that somewhere on your Mac – probably in your Pictures folder – you will find a file whose name starts with iPhoto, and which is a package. You can open up a package by selecting it, right-clicking, and selecting Show Package Contents, after which you can navigate inside and do whatever. Presumably the iPhoto library will contain copies of your pictures in standard formats (such as .JPG), although you may find that the way the files are named, and organized, might not be set up to be friendly for human consumption.

If you do find an iPhotos library package, I would strongly suggest not opening it up – but instead, copying it to an external drive (or another folder) and doing a Show Package Contents on the copy. That way, if you mess up the copy while you are looking for things, or copying or moving stuff out of it, you've still got the original iPhoto library from which you can make a new working copy. If you tamper with the original, and mess things up, and it happens to be your only copy, you're up the creek without a paddle.

I don't know if there is any automated way to convert an iPhoto library to a Photos library in Ventura, given that the migration to Photos happened several versions of macOS earlier. Maybe someone else will be able to comment on that.

Servant of Cats wrote: I don't know if there is any automated way to convert an iPhoto library to a Photos library in Ventura,

Opening the iPhoto package can get you originals, but you lose all organization and editing. The best way around this is to use the trusted 3rd party app PowerPhotos ($40) which, in addition to a whole host of additional tools, will convert an iPhoto Library to a modern Photos Library while preserving structure and metadata. PowerPhotos is run by pretty much all of experienced users of Photos. It started out as the iPhoto Library Manager, so they know about iPhoto.

There is a free version, but I don't think that it includes iPhoto conversion, but it's worth a look. The author of the app, Brian Webster, usually gets answers to my questions very quickly.

And do follow Servant of Cats' suggestion that you make a backup copy before messing with

Have you searched your Mac and your external drives systematically for the old iPhoto Libraries?

You can recognize the iPhoto Libraries by the filename extension ".photolibrary".

Try this:

• Open a Finder window showing you your home folder or all files on your computer, then enter .photolibrary into the search field.
• When the search result option appear click "Kind: Photo Library"

You will recognize the old iPhoto Libraries by the icon showing a fan of three pictures with a pink flower.

The Photos.app (on Ventura) can no longer migrate the iPhoto Libraries to the new Photos.app, but you can import media the iPhoto Libraries into an existing Photos Library.

In Photos go to the File menu, then use the command "Import" and select an iPhoto Library. Photos will show you the photos and videos from the iPhoto Library that are missing in your current open library. You will lose the albums you created, also the keywords you assigned, but the photos and videos will be imported. The edited photos will be imported as a master-version pair, so the adjustments will be saved.

In the long run it will be worthwhile to invest into PowerPhotos, as suggested by Richard, if you have many iPhoto Libraries libraries to migrate, so you can also migrate the structure with albums and events, plus the keywords, for a better migration.

The Queen B wrote: …And because I am rather non-technical (all I wanted to do was edit and store photos) between the poor advice and my own negligence I am unable to answer the question about file formatting.

To see the format of a drive, you can select it, maybe in the side bar or on the desktop, and open the Info window either with File>Get Info, or just entering command-i ( ⌘ i ) to get this:

This disk is formatted in APFS, and the "Ignore Ownership" box at the bottom is checked.

How have you been trying to restore the Photos Libraries from your Backup drive? what kind of backup have you been keeping? Have you been using Time Machine or did you keep copies of your Photos Libraries on your external drive?

When you want to be able to open an iPhoto Library or a Photos Library on an external drive, the volume with the library need to be formatted MacOS Extended (journaled) or APFS. Did you check the file system format of your new external drive, before you copied the data there?