"An error occurred while trying to save your photo library..."
Installed iPhoto6.
Started app. It said it would take a few seconds or minutes to upgrade.
About 6 hours later after churning on thumbnails it is now claiming this error over and over with some time that goes by in between:
"An error occurred while trying to save your photo library."
"Some recent changes may be lost. Make sure your hard disk has enough space and that iPhoto is able to access the iPhoto Library folder."
It says I have 22,759 photos in Library. The Library was a subset of my images, named "iPhoto Library 2005" and it was intentionally kept below the 25,000 limit of iPhoto5.
Since Steve claims iPhoto6 can easily handle 250,000 photos, I clicked on the upgrade button with confidence. This now appears to be a mistake. Last night I was working on an iDVD for the local school and the majority of that work has simply vanished. There were 320 photos. I spent hours adding keywords, ranking, adjusting temperature, focus, exposure, etc.
Of the 320, only 16 photos survived. They are 16 in a row from the middle of the roll near the end but not at the end. The roll name was lost. The name is now just "Roll 226" and none of the photos have keywords. I know at least one of the 16 should have the keyword "DUPE" and the ranking 2 STARS since it precedes a double that I ranked 2 during a slideshow, sorted by ranking, and dragged to the DUPE keyword. All 16 should have the ACROCK keyword which I initially assigned to all photos.
Again, 304 of 320 have vanished and the 16 that remain have no keywords or rankings.
I watched the slide show in iPhoto5 three times with different music candidates so I know the keywording and rankings evaporated in iPhoto6. I also clicked ACROCK and option clicked DUPE and POOR so that all of the music program photos except dupes and poor images would vanish. I only deleted one photo so there were not a lot of changes to the library in terms of photos in it. I cannot think of any reason why the 16 chosen survived. Only two were placed in a DVD dropzone and they are scattered amongst the 16 survivors.
Also, the ACROCK and DUPE keywords are also gone while the POOR keyword added in August is in the keyword table just fine.
I exported these 320 photos last night to iDVD and tried almost all of the different themes and I dragged about 10 different photos to the dropzones, hit play, hit motion, etc.
It seems very strange that 16 photos from the middle of the pack would survive.
It seems extra odd that iPhoto5 and iDVD treated these as "established" photos, not photos hanging in the wings somewhere ready to vanish in an upgrade.
I gracefully saved and quit iDVD and iPhoto5 and there were no crashes and nothing strange happened while making the DVD. I was hoping today to try out the new themes and maybe find one that is just right for the kids. Instead, about 300 of 320 photos of the kids went bye-bye along with all the work on the photos!
I'm nervous that many more photos are missing but I will need to do a ton of checking to see what else has been deleted by the upgrade.
The user message that iPhoto6 presents is nearly useless and strange. It offers little if anything to go on in terms of a repair procedure. After saying an error has occurred, it says some recent changes could be lost but doesn't expand at all on what they may be or why.
From my experience, recently added photos, keywords, keyword assignments, rankings and maybe more can all be lost. To compound matters, before the upgrade it says that you cannot go back to the prior (working!) library in iPhoto5. Beware!
It finishes by suggesting two vague steps to take. The first is to make sure your disk has "enough" space. How much is "enough"? It doesn't say something like X GB available, Y GB needed. A user would have no clue about how much space to free up. I have over 17 GB and assumed that would be enough. I sure hope it doesn't require double the space of the existing library. I would hope it has a smarter algorithm than that since 23,000 photos at about 3 MB each maps to about 70 GB. That's a lot of "temporary" space to require to perform an upgrade. Since the upgrade/error message provide no details (unlike package installers which supposedly tell you how much space you need), users like me would have no clue if 70 GB is plenty or not enough.
I found 24 GB secretly used by iPhoto 5 for an iPod Photo Cache and a tech bulletin saying this just grows and grows without control and it can be deleted SO I wouldn't put huge hidden disk usage past iPhoto6.
The last none-to-helpful suggestion is that a user make sure that iPhoto is able to access the iPhoto Library folder. Huh?!??!?
Wouldn't this be a great thing to confirm via software before setting about on 6+ hours of work, especially if there is an error message hard-coded in the software confirming that Apple knows the result may be losing valuable customer photos and hours of work on enhancing, keywording, creating DVDs, etc.?
Of course. This appears negligent. To know that customer file loss will likely result but not checking these things out in advance before taking that risk seems like putting the cart before the horse at customers' expense & pain and certain loss of irreplaceable family photos (for the, say, 80%+ of iPhoto users that "plan" to get a backup routine established?).
I got burned in the iPhoto5 upgrade as well, losing photos, so I was sure to have a backup so it wouldn't happen again. Most I fear won't be so fortunate so be advised of the risk and work with copies of your photos only.
Also, why would iPhoto5 have all the permissions it needs to store, edit, tag and otherwise work with 320 photos added last night? Why would version 5 have plenty of permissions to use the folders and the photos in them. Why would iPhoto 6 suddenly lose those permissions or not have enough? This hardly makes any sense. The only way the permissions were set, the iPhoto libraries got created and the albums got created was by dragging a folder of images onto the albums pane in iPhoto5. So, iPhoto5 set all the permissions, everything is under one user account and there should be no surprise permissions for iPhoto6 to deal with.
It seems unbelievable that iPhoto 6 couldn't do what iPhoto 5 was doing. I never changed permissions and never touched files in the iPhoto 5 structure.
I can only guess that recently added keywords, recently added photos and recently added rankings and keyword taggings linger in some at-risk staging area that a version 6 upgrade doesn't know how to deal with. This seems like a lame way to code this app so I don't consider this a good guess but what else could it be?
Anyone else have a better hunch at a root cause?
Anyone else have an idea of a cure?
Anyone else run into this?
It sure doesn't look like there was a test case for having near 25,000 photos (an iPhoto 5 documented requirement), working with the latest roll and then doing a version 6 upgrade because it failed miserably--user data loss--without any special effort to find defects. In a former life I tested software and released software was much more difficult to break than this.
I would appreciate any other user experiences/solutions related to this problem. I am reluctant to import another 22,000 photos from iPhoto Library 2004 only to find more photos go poof without any rhyme or reason.
Thanks in advance for your help and I hope this alerts others to a potential for valuable photo loss (i.e., back up before you upgrade, verify iPhoto Library permissions--whatever that means--and have scads of disk space available assuming there's any truth to the error message!).
--Sam
G5 Dual 2.7 GHz 2 GB DDR SDRAM Mac OS X (10.4.4)
Started app. It said it would take a few seconds or minutes to upgrade.
About 6 hours later after churning on thumbnails it is now claiming this error over and over with some time that goes by in between:
"An error occurred while trying to save your photo library."
"Some recent changes may be lost. Make sure your hard disk has enough space and that iPhoto is able to access the iPhoto Library folder."
It says I have 22,759 photos in Library. The Library was a subset of my images, named "iPhoto Library 2005" and it was intentionally kept below the 25,000 limit of iPhoto5.
Since Steve claims iPhoto6 can easily handle 250,000 photos, I clicked on the upgrade button with confidence. This now appears to be a mistake. Last night I was working on an iDVD for the local school and the majority of that work has simply vanished. There were 320 photos. I spent hours adding keywords, ranking, adjusting temperature, focus, exposure, etc.
Of the 320, only 16 photos survived. They are 16 in a row from the middle of the roll near the end but not at the end. The roll name was lost. The name is now just "Roll 226" and none of the photos have keywords. I know at least one of the 16 should have the keyword "DUPE" and the ranking 2 STARS since it precedes a double that I ranked 2 during a slideshow, sorted by ranking, and dragged to the DUPE keyword. All 16 should have the ACROCK keyword which I initially assigned to all photos.
Again, 304 of 320 have vanished and the 16 that remain have no keywords or rankings.
I watched the slide show in iPhoto5 three times with different music candidates so I know the keywording and rankings evaporated in iPhoto6. I also clicked ACROCK and option clicked DUPE and POOR so that all of the music program photos except dupes and poor images would vanish. I only deleted one photo so there were not a lot of changes to the library in terms of photos in it. I cannot think of any reason why the 16 chosen survived. Only two were placed in a DVD dropzone and they are scattered amongst the 16 survivors.
Also, the ACROCK and DUPE keywords are also gone while the POOR keyword added in August is in the keyword table just fine.
I exported these 320 photos last night to iDVD and tried almost all of the different themes and I dragged about 10 different photos to the dropzones, hit play, hit motion, etc.
It seems very strange that 16 photos from the middle of the pack would survive.
It seems extra odd that iPhoto5 and iDVD treated these as "established" photos, not photos hanging in the wings somewhere ready to vanish in an upgrade.
I gracefully saved and quit iDVD and iPhoto5 and there were no crashes and nothing strange happened while making the DVD. I was hoping today to try out the new themes and maybe find one that is just right for the kids. Instead, about 300 of 320 photos of the kids went bye-bye along with all the work on the photos!
I'm nervous that many more photos are missing but I will need to do a ton of checking to see what else has been deleted by the upgrade.
The user message that iPhoto6 presents is nearly useless and strange. It offers little if anything to go on in terms of a repair procedure. After saying an error has occurred, it says some recent changes could be lost but doesn't expand at all on what they may be or why.
From my experience, recently added photos, keywords, keyword assignments, rankings and maybe more can all be lost. To compound matters, before the upgrade it says that you cannot go back to the prior (working!) library in iPhoto5. Beware!
It finishes by suggesting two vague steps to take. The first is to make sure your disk has "enough" space. How much is "enough"? It doesn't say something like X GB available, Y GB needed. A user would have no clue about how much space to free up. I have over 17 GB and assumed that would be enough. I sure hope it doesn't require double the space of the existing library. I would hope it has a smarter algorithm than that since 23,000 photos at about 3 MB each maps to about 70 GB. That's a lot of "temporary" space to require to perform an upgrade. Since the upgrade/error message provide no details (unlike package installers which supposedly tell you how much space you need), users like me would have no clue if 70 GB is plenty or not enough.
I found 24 GB secretly used by iPhoto 5 for an iPod Photo Cache and a tech bulletin saying this just grows and grows without control and it can be deleted SO I wouldn't put huge hidden disk usage past iPhoto6.
The last none-to-helpful suggestion is that a user make sure that iPhoto is able to access the iPhoto Library folder. Huh?!??!?
Wouldn't this be a great thing to confirm via software before setting about on 6+ hours of work, especially if there is an error message hard-coded in the software confirming that Apple knows the result may be losing valuable customer photos and hours of work on enhancing, keywording, creating DVDs, etc.?
Of course. This appears negligent. To know that customer file loss will likely result but not checking these things out in advance before taking that risk seems like putting the cart before the horse at customers' expense & pain and certain loss of irreplaceable family photos (for the, say, 80%+ of iPhoto users that "plan" to get a backup routine established?).
I got burned in the iPhoto5 upgrade as well, losing photos, so I was sure to have a backup so it wouldn't happen again. Most I fear won't be so fortunate so be advised of the risk and work with copies of your photos only.
Also, why would iPhoto5 have all the permissions it needs to store, edit, tag and otherwise work with 320 photos added last night? Why would version 5 have plenty of permissions to use the folders and the photos in them. Why would iPhoto 6 suddenly lose those permissions or not have enough? This hardly makes any sense. The only way the permissions were set, the iPhoto libraries got created and the albums got created was by dragging a folder of images onto the albums pane in iPhoto5. So, iPhoto5 set all the permissions, everything is under one user account and there should be no surprise permissions for iPhoto6 to deal with.
It seems unbelievable that iPhoto 6 couldn't do what iPhoto 5 was doing. I never changed permissions and never touched files in the iPhoto 5 structure.
I can only guess that recently added keywords, recently added photos and recently added rankings and keyword taggings linger in some at-risk staging area that a version 6 upgrade doesn't know how to deal with. This seems like a lame way to code this app so I don't consider this a good guess but what else could it be?
Anyone else have a better hunch at a root cause?
Anyone else have an idea of a cure?
Anyone else run into this?
It sure doesn't look like there was a test case for having near 25,000 photos (an iPhoto 5 documented requirement), working with the latest roll and then doing a version 6 upgrade because it failed miserably--user data loss--without any special effort to find defects. In a former life I tested software and released software was much more difficult to break than this.
I would appreciate any other user experiences/solutions related to this problem. I am reluctant to import another 22,000 photos from iPhoto Library 2004 only to find more photos go poof without any rhyme or reason.
Thanks in advance for your help and I hope this alerts others to a potential for valuable photo loss (i.e., back up before you upgrade, verify iPhoto Library permissions--whatever that means--and have scads of disk space available assuming there's any truth to the error message!).
--Sam
G5 Dual 2.7 GHz 2 GB DDR SDRAM Mac OS X (10.4.4)
