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thumbnails show up but cant view some pictures.

I installed ilife 11 about 2 weeks ago and haven't noticed any problems until I started organizing my library the past few days. I sorted everything into events the way I wanted them and then decided to go through one by one and assign faces and places. This is when I noticed that many of the photos are unavailable. the thumbnails are there but when you click on the picture all you get is a large grey triangle with a ! ? I have tried rebuilding (control-option while opening Iphoto) I selected all the boxes. that fixed nothing. then I tried rebuilding the iphoto library with iphoto library manager but the new library that was created was missing all of the photos that would not previously open. Is this just something wrong with the new version ? Please help me. thanks

macbook pro, Mac OS X (10.6.5)

Posted on Nov 24, 2010 10:47 AM

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20 replies

Nov 24, 2010 11:56 AM in response to sjh9902

OK so after doing a little more digging i found that, while the "missing photos" are still in the thumbnails folder they are missing from the originals file. Well the odd thing is that I did the same ilife install on my Imac and there are no missing photos on that computer. sadly I do not have a back up of my macbook pro from before the upgrade because the ilife upgrade and external harddrive where my bday gifts and I did things backwords and installed the ilife software on both machines before setting up the harddrive. ugh. Oh well. at least the imac still has all the pictures on it.

So my next question would be, is there a way to import the missing photos from my imac without having to completely start from scratch on my macbook? I dont wanna lose the faces and such 😟 I may just have to manually go through and transfer the missing ones over my network? thats gunna take a while. guess that'll teach me a lesson huh

Nov 24, 2010 1:20 PM in response to sjh9902

OK so now i am so confused. I had a bunch of photos of a trip to yosemite on my macbook along with some family photos i had taken. well because these were taken on a vacation, I only had them on my macbook. never did put them on my imac. so I freaked out a bit and looked in the "masters" folder in iphoto contents and I found all of them in there. they are in the right folders. I did not move anything. So i tried to import them back into iphoto and iphoto says they are already there? OMG i just dont know what to do . any advice would be appreciated. thanks

Nov 24, 2010 1:20 PM in response to sjh9902

Option 1
Back Up and try rebuild the library: hold down the command and option (or alt) keys while launching iPhoto. Use the resulting dialogue to rebuild. Choose to Rebuild iPhoto Library Database from automatic backup.

If that fails:

Option 2
Download iPhoto Library Manager and use its rebuild function. This will create a new library based on data in the albumdata.xml file. Not everything will be brought over - no slideshows, books or calendars, for instance - but it should get all your albums and keywords, faces and places back.

Because this process creates an entirely new library and leaves your old one untouched, it is non-destructive, and if you're not happy with the results you can simply return to your old one.

Regards

TD

Nov 24, 2010 4:45 PM in response to sjh9902

well i am still not sure what happened here but I will post how i fixed it in case anyone else has the same problem. it was a huge pain but at least i have all of my photos and the library is working correctly.
I created an alias of my original iphoto library and placed it on the desktop. i then ran the iphoto library manager and rebuilt the library. i then had to manually import the missing photos from the alias into the new library. everything works great but now i have to go through and redo faces and places. oh well. glad I have my time machine working now. .

Dec 11, 2010 2:48 AM in response to Yer_Man

Dear mr. TD

Having just installed the new iLife almost a third of my photos are gone and the big exclamation triangle appears. I have tried rebuilding the library, but that didnt do me any good, I still cant access my pictures.
The last time this happened, i tried using iPhoto Library manager. It erased 90% of my pictures.
Do you have any suggestion what to do?
With kind regards
Peter Frederiksen

Feb 5, 2011 3:08 AM in response to sjh9902

I have some photos that I retrieved off a damaged hard disk on my PC. I can view the thumbnails but the some of the photos show up damaged. I have tried to repair them using library rebuild on Iphoto and on iphoto manager but it hasnt improved anything. I recognise that these photos may be irreparable but am hoping that their is someone out there that can help me.

Feb 5, 2011 11:39 AM in response to Yer_Man

TD, Thanks so much for your extremely dedicated and prompt support. I really appreciate it - it's a bright spot in this frustrating and bewildering world of computers.

I did try holding down those keys and nothing happens - but I re-read your first post and tried your other suggestion, to re-build my library using iPhoto Library Manager. I successfully re-built my Library, but when I was finished I got a message saying that it could not import 21 photos (the ones I had been having trouble with) because they could not be found in my original library. It seems, though, that if the thumbnails are visible they must be there, somewhere. Do you have any other ideas of ways that I could access them? Unfortunately the ones that I want, I have already deleted from my camera.

Thanks again!

thumbnails show up but cant view some pictures.

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