Dragged pictues file to desktop turned to "Poof cloud"

The various icons in the sidebar of a finder window are simply aliases: dragging them out is the same as dragging icons out of the Dock - it deletes the alias, it doesn't delete the original. Your pictures are still in the Pictures folder in your Home Folder.

If you've dragged additional copies of the pictures into iPhoto you will have to remove them manually. Click on 'Events' at the top of the iPhoto sidebar and you will see a listing by date - you can then delete the dates on which you added the extra photos.

I selected the Pictures and dragged it to my desktop assuming it would end up as a pictures file on the desktop, but instead it went "poof"

All you did is remove that shortcut from the sidebar. Good thing, too, since moving your entire Pictures folder to the desktop probably wouldn't be a very good idea. If you click on your home folder in the sidebar, you should see the Pictures folder inside it, and can drag that back to the sidebar. If it is not there, you've done something else that you haven't described here.

As to iPhoto, this should not have caused you to lose your iPhoto library. (Moving the folder to the desktop probably would have made iPhoto lose track of the library.) Have you actually tried iPhoto, or were you simply assuming it was gone? If iPhoto is reporting its library to be missing, then again, you've done something else that you have not described here.

Exactly what i did is what i described.

If you had an existing iPhoto library and iPhoto suddenly acted like there wasn't a library any more, then you must have done something else. What you described just removes the shortcut from the sidebar, and does not in any way affect the original.

Click on your home folder in the sidebar of a Finder window. You should be given a listing of folders to the right that include things like Desktop, Documents, Downloads, etc. Is Pictures in that list? If not, we need to determine where it went.

If it is in that list, look inside it. There should be an item in there called iPhoto Library.

Now, you say that you let iPhoto make a new library when it failed to find the old one. That is a VERY bad thing to do... if you find that data is missing somehow, you should NEVER just proceed with business as usual. The first order of business should be to figure out what happened. By allowing iPhoto to make a new library, you have muddied the waters, since it may have re-created both these items if you somehow moved them. If the library had somehow been damaged, then re-creating it could potentially destroy the old one.

Try searching your computer for "iPhoto Library" and "Pictures" and see if you find just one of each or two.

Thomas,

would you kindly take a look at this - in particular, the last post by the OP (1/29 at 2:10 pm):

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2736918

Thanks.

The problem is that I still have no idea what happened to make iPhoto lose track of its library. In light of that, I cannot make any recommendations as to what you should or shouldn't delete. What I would recommend doing at this point would be taking your machine to your nearest Apple Store. Make an appointment at the Genius Bar beforehand (online, through the [Apple Retail Store page|http://www.apple.com/retail>) and have a Genius look at the machine with you and help you figure out what has happened. If there isn't an Apple Store near you, try some other Mac-savvy computer tech.