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My daughter traveled for six months in SE Asia with her MacBook Air with the Lion OS. She routinely deleted all iPhoto 11 content after backing up with Time Machine on a 1 TB external drive as the drive on her Mac reached capacity. My question: how can she create a single, complete iPhoto library on an external drive from these multiple backups?
iPhoto '11, Mac OS X (10.7.3), MacBook Air
Your daughter will have to restore the iPhoto Libraries by going back in time on Time Machine and extracting the different libraries at the points in time before they got erased.
iPhoto does not have a feature to merge these libraries. So she could either export the images from each library and then reimport those into one selected library or use the iPhoto Library Manager application to extract photos from one library and to import them into another. Using iPhoto Library Manager she could preserve keywords and captions, but this software is not free.
Next time your daughter should simply create her iPhoto Library on her external volume, so that she has enough space to collect all pictures in one library.
Regards
Léonie
I'm afraid your daughter profundly misunderstood how Time Machine works. It's a back up app not an Archive one. The difference? Once the back up disk fills data that has been deleted from the internal drive is also deleted from the back up.
If the back up drive never filled, then all of her photos should still be there, somewhere.
The next problem is that if you restore the most recent back up it will not have material that was deleted before.
For instance, if there is a back up of June 1 and you restore that, it will not have photos she deleted from iPhoto on May 31, the restore of the March 31 Library will not have the photos she deleted from iPhoto in February etc. So you will need to go back to the earliest back up that you have and restore each library in turn.
You can then merge these Libraries with the paid ($20) version of iPhoto Library Manager
Restoring a single iPhoto library from multiple Time Machine backups
