iPhoto '11 stuck in loop trying to upgrade.

I have another idea (I hope my english is good enough)

01. I have the same loop if I want to upgrade from iLife 09 to 11.
02. I tried to upgrade die Library three times, no success.
03. I restarted my mac
04. I have 40GB mor free space on my disk 😟
05. I started iPhoto and all my pictures are gone
06. Luckily I have a backup. I restored my pictures
07. I tried again to upgrade my Library, no success.
08. I restored the iPhoto .app 09
09. I opened the 09.app and empty the iPhoto trash, delete all Photobooks, an delete all ä& ...from my file names.
10. I opened the 11.app
11. Again upgrading Library (Database)
12. Everything is working fine 🙂

13. I think the reason were the Photobooks.

To add some further weight to the video theory, I have noticed as I re-add them to iPhoto some of my videos ( AVIs ) will not play in Quicktime. I have to view them using VLC. I'm wondering if this gave the upgrade process a brain-ache !

And to cap it all, iMovie seems to be unhappy with AVIs from the same camera. I have had to remove some from my iMovie events as well.

Hippo

Message was edited by: Hippotech

After some digging, decided to uninstall DivX - for me, that fixed iMovie and I suspect it would have fixed iPhoto but I'm not going round that loop again 🙂

Hippo

My probllem is that I have 2 mac pro computers. One with 1.45TB of data that should be in iphoto and backed up in TM. The IPhoto external drive after attempting to upgrade the pictures to work in IPhoto11 when down to 75GB and the second computer that has in TM backup 750GB only now has 15GB in the IPhoto drive. Iphoto upgrade lost some 735GB of pictures. The other computer lost some 900GB of data. Apple is trying to work this out. I hope they can as I will not take a chance of losing my backups..

same problem just ays upgrading for hours

Same issue. Already rebuilt iPhoto database in iPhoto 9 and copies rebuilt database back to main HD. iPhoto 11 says database must be updated. Get the progress bar and the new sidebar with albums, etc. but never get photos.

I did repair permissions and got the photos but upon restart was back to the beginning with iPhoto asking to rebuild database.

Try deleting the preference file and iPhoto cache folder contents of your User/Library/Caches/com.apple.iPhoto folder.

I have the same problem of the upgrade loop. Apple for someone running the most current software this is pretty bad egg on your face. I don't like paying $ for upgrades that are unusable after installation.

Message was edited by: bjames008

Message was edited by: bjames008

Fixed! Removed all keepsakes from iPhoto 09. Uninstalled DivX. Option clicked iPhoto 11 to choose library. It upgraded the library once - then OK. Not sure which of the three worked - but something did it.

My money is on DivX - as mentioned earlier it fixed both iPhoto & iMovie for me.

I had a few keepsakes and these didn't cause an issue.

Had the same issue, so i navigated to the applications folder->iphoto (11) and right clicked show package content, i then navigated to MacOS then double clicked dbRepair ,terminal opened but it failed.

I then double clicked on iphoto within the same folder under MacOS within the iphoto package, a terminal opened lunched iphoto, it upgraded the db(10-15min) and whoala!, works perfectly.

Tried G8mb1t's fix, didn't work for me. When I quit and reopen iPhoto I get the same message (database has to be upgraded).

Opening iPhoto from the MacOS folder in the package contents spat this out in the terminal window while upgrading the database:
http://skitch.com/madsb/dhihx/terminal-154x29

Maybe it can be of some help to the Apple engineers (if they even read this forum).

My terminal only showed 4 error messages, complaining about missing semi-colon.
the upgrade completed and now works for me, your terminal's got alot more issue i see,
did you do anything else before you tried my method?

I had no problem upgrading, but now I have a problem restarting! It's been spinning for about twenty minutes now in an attempt to open the library. Ho do I downgrade?

I've tried the (standard) upgrade process a couple of times before trying your solution.

I've been able to upgrade every time and see my photos afterwards, but each time I launch iPhoto I'm prompted to upgrade again.