WHERE are my PHOTOS?????

PEOPLE READ THIS, I FOUND ALL MY PICTURES!!!! in iPhoto, go to File > Switch To Library, and what the update did was create a new library called iPhotoLibrary(default), select iPhotoLibrary above it. found every single original picture. i hope this helps everyone recover from the heart attack we all no doubt experienced updating iPhoto.

Just wanted to add my observation. I had a similar problem, but in my case I think it was a previous upgrade which split my library in two. So when I upgraded to iPhoto 11, it looked as if a bunch of albums were gone. Here's the background:

1. At some point, maybe a year or two ago, I upgraded to iPhoto 9, on my MacPro desktop machine. I have historically kept my iPhoto library on an external hard drive.

2. in iPhoto 9, it looked like all my photos were there. I having a naming convention for albums which is YYYY_MM_EventName. That way they appear sorted chronologically in iPhoto.

3. But it turns out what was happening was, iPhoto was now pointing to a new library, on the INTERNAL hard drive of the Mac.

4. Fast forward to yesterday. I copied the library from the 1st external hard drive, to a 2nd external hard drive, thinking I was grabbing my entire library. I then plugged that into my new MacBook Pro, thinking I would take my photos on my trip to show them to friends.

5. At this point the app store apparently thought it needed the latest version of iPhoto, so it downloaded that. Then I tried to launch it and switch library to the one on the external drive. Then it said I needed the upgrade tool. So I downloaded and ran that. Then it upgraded my thumbnails to hi resolution. All this took a couple hours. Finally it was done. I opened iPhoto, and, to my horror, found that 3 years of my albums were not there.

6. It was at that point that I looked at my old library, on my old MacPro, running iPhoto 9. So I tried to then figure out where it was actually pointing. That's when I discovered that all those missing albums were being stored on the internal drive of the MacPro.

So here are my observations, which may only apply in my case, but maybe apply to other people:

- It's just stupid, and annoying, that iPhoto 9 could be pointing to two separate libraries. That's just a recipe for disaster.

- It's incredibly irritating that iPhoto is so proprietary, and hides things from the user, such that it's not easy to see where your photos actually are.

- The new iPhoto 11 seems to create one giant file on your drive, instead of a folder with subfolders named for the year. Now they've made it even more difficult to know where things are and what's going on.

Now I'm going to try to manually put these folders together, on my old external drive, and salvage this mess. And see if I can go through the whole thing again, but this time, where it correctly consolidates the entire library.

We are at the mercy of technology companies whose decisions are sometimes highly questionable. Maybe a nice HTML5 page and a bunch of folders on a hard drive would organize my photos perfectly well...

You got that second library on the internal drive because at some point you launched iPhoto with the drive containing the Library unavailable. iPhoto found no Library so it created a new one. iPhoto 11 now asks where that Library is.

iPhoto does not point to two Libraries. You can have multiple Libraries. But you can only open one at a time. That's a feature and not a disaster.

There is nothing proprietary at all about iPhoto. It stores your files in folders in the Finder - not that this matters, as you never access them via the Finder anyway - and it even uses open source SQL databases for the dbs in the Library. Every piece of information you put into a Library can be exported from it again, apart from Faces, as there is no agreed system for sharing such information.

iPhoto 11 does not "create one giant file on your drive". The package format for iPhoto was introduced in iPhoto 08, released in 2007. It's not a file, it's a package - a folder designed to look like a file. It's to protect the Library from inexperienced users doing damage. Or people who don't understand iPhoto and how it works.

Maybe a nice HTML5 page and a bunch of folders on a hard drive would organize my photos perfectly well...

Perhaps it would. But then why are you using iPhoto, with non-destructive editing, OS integration and all the other features if that's what you want.

If you have Aperture 3.3 or later and iPhoto 9.3 or later you can merge libraries with Aperture.

Otherwise the only way to merge Libraries is with the paid ($20) version of iPhoto Library Manager

Going forward:

For help accessing your photos in iPhoto see this user tip:

https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-4491

Terence, thanks for your prompt reply and clarifying that it's a package, not a file. I've since opened the package and poked around. I get the idea.

There's a trade-off between convenience and control. When we become users of iPhoto, we agree to the iPhoto paradigm. So we have to play by the rules of its ways of organizing files. It's a nice app in most ways.

But the fact that "at some point you launched iPhoto with the drive containing the Library unavailable" and now it's created two libraries, where I only wanted one, to me, is not a feature. It's a bug. Maybe disaster is too strong a word, but it is certainly a file management mess, and a recipe for confusing the user, and wasting the user's precious time. (The fact that you say "iPhoto 11 now asks where the library is" suggests that Apple realized how utterly stupid it was that previously iPhoto would silently create a new library). I'm glad the "feature" has been removed in iPhoto 11.

In my particular case, I don't want two libraries. I want one. I can certainly imagine there are people out there who might intentionally want to create two or more libraries. But I cannot imagine anyone who would actually want iPhoto to invisibly, suddenly, create two libraries, without their knowledge, and with no message to that effect informing the user of that event, such that they subsequently don't know which is which, and now have a file management problem on their hands, such as I now have, which will likely take hours to fix.

Now I need to merge my libraries. Using either Aperture or iPhoto Library Manager (whose website does not say they support iPhoto 11, so I won't be using that). Fine. So it's Aperture then. It's not how I wanted to spend my day off, but that is how I will be spending it.

EDIT: oh and I just noticed Aperture costs 60 GBP. nice

There's a trade off when you use any app - Word rather than Pages, Photoshop versus Acorn, Mail versus Entourage, whatever - they all offer features at a cost. Whatever app you use means you have to engage with it on its terms.

iPhoto Library Manager supports iPhoto 11. Has done for the four years of iPhoto 11's life, so far.

I said that multiple libraries was the feature, not that iPhoto would create one when you didn't have the actual Library available.

I thought I knew a bit about iphoto and its libraries, plus I was told to create new libraries (for my many photos). I did it, thought i knew how to use it, but, now when I go to make a manual backup of my old (large) library, where the **** is it on the Mac?

I've shown 'package contents' but, now with Mavericks, there is no general "home" "library" that i can find? And the "show package" only shows my current iphotos library.

So here I am, reduced, again, to searching the net for instructions on even FINDING the **** library of original files.

So, although different Libraries certainly make iphoto faster to use, I wish there were an obvious place of *** they are STORED.

That library is invisible.

NOTE: In Lion and Mountain Lion the Home/Library folder is now invisible. To make it permanently visible enter the following in the Terminal application window: chflags nohidden ~/Library and press the Return key - 10.7: Un-hide the User Library folder.

For Mavericks, 10.9, go to your Home folder and use the View ➙ Show View Options menu to bring the this window:

And what's with all of the astericks? We don't need them here.

Try ask that question again, this time without the profanity and in a way that another person might understand.

I WANT MY PHOTOS BACK!!!!!!!!!!!!!

How its possible? PLEASE

Restore from your back up.