Q: iphoto photos not opening get black exclamation mark

Yes, that is the Originals folder.

Well the lis will tell you what it could not find. You then try to find them. If you do you import them anew to the new iPhoto.

To create a new Library:

Hold down the option (or alt) key key and launch iPhoto. From the resulting menu select 'Create Library'

You add photos to a library with the File -> Add to Library command or just drag and drop onto the iPhoto Window.

Nice one, thanks for your help.

Ok the rebuild took 11hrs and resulted with the following!

27093 photos were imported

35 albums were copied

992 events were copied

2142 photos failed to be successfully imported into the destination library by iPhoto

4743 errors occurred during the transfer

4743 errors is not good and I guess after wasting 2 days rebuilding my library twice I am going to have to Create a new one and start from scratch!  I am very disappointed in iPhoto and had no idea it could go so horribly wrong.  I appreciate I have not lost all my photos but I have wasted a lot of time and will still have to re make my entire library agiain. Around 23,000 / 10yrs of photos.

Could this be the problem that there are too many photos in the library?  Is there a limit?

Oh well I guess it is back to the drawing board!

Thanks for your help.

James

4743 errors is not good and I guess after wasting 2 days rebuilding my library twice I am going to have to Create a new one and start from scratch!

No you don't. You've now got a new working Library with most if it intact. Now you have to recover the missing images and add them to that.

If you start from scratch then you lose any work you've previously done - and it's a whole lot more work too.

So, put another way, Library Manager has done 80% of the work for you, now you'll need to do the last 20%.

Yes, there is a nominal limit to the size of the Library: 1,000,000 items, so you've a wee bit of headroom yet.

But how do I even know where to start?

I had 690 events before all organised now I have over 9000, and a number of my albums are empty! So this is nowhere near how my library was organised before. There are files missing from all over my library and I have no idea what is missing! How do I find the missing 20%???

Don't even know where to start!

From the list of errors in Library Mnager?

I don't have the time or patients to go through 4743 errors especially as it won't take my library back to how it was!

I can't even work out what the errors are it just says I have 4743 errors.

As I said I now have 9000 events when I only had 640 before! So my library will be nothing like how it was before anyway.

To be fair my old library is in tact, I just get an ! When I try and open some of the files.  Is there anyway I can just relink the thumbnails to their original missing files?  The files are still in the same folder and have never been moved, it's just that iPhoto can't see them.

If not I guess I'll have to just create a new library. Or get a PC!

Thanks for your help anyway.

Well if starting over from scratch is faster for you, do that.

The original library is damaged, you can't repair it.

Thanks for your help anyway.

Ok,  so I rebuilt from scratch.  and it is looking a lot more like my old library only without all my albums.

The problem I have now is that I have a lot of duplicated events but often with duplicates in them.  For example I might have 2 events with same name and one will contain 50 pics and the other 11 (sometimes there will be a duplicate in each folder).

Is this because some of the source files are coming from the originals folder and some are coming from the modified folder.  Why does iPhoto do this and what is the purpose / difference of having two different folders containing source material.

I was tempted to move everything from the individual modified folders (there are loads of them) into the originals folders (putting them all in the right subfolders) as I thought it might avoid this problem and keep everything together to start with, however I wanted to keep everything as similar to my original library as possible when I recreated my library.

If it is not going to mess everything up, I could move everything from the individual modified folders to their respective originals folders and then re-import all pics again.  If this would solve my problem.

Cheers

James

I have just seen this https://discussions.apple.com/message/23432004#23432004

Which says the The original is as you suspect an exact copy of the original imported image - the modified is a preview of the current version with editing - to start over you should use the originals

Therefore should I start again and forget the Modified folder and just import the originals.  It took all day but I'm happy to do it again if it means it will contain all the right events from my original library.

The thing that doesn't make sense for me though is that I have about 9000 files (all in sub folders within sub folders) in my modified folder and I'm pretty sure that I haven't modified 9000 pictures so how is this possible?

The most usual reason is that the images have Exif display tags.

If your camera has an auto-rotate feature, for instance,  the camera does not actually rotate any pixels in the file, but instead flags it with an instruction: "Display me this way". This is a tag in the Exif metadata.

When you import a file with this tag iPhoto creates a modified version. It does this because most of the apps that integrate with it - email clients, word processors etc - simply don't understand this Exif tag. So if you used the shot in a word processing doc, uploaded it to many Web site etc, the shot would come out sideways.

Jpeg Previews are also created from Raws on import for the same reason.

I see, that is interesting (and clever) thank you.

So to go back to the recreation of my library.  Shall I create a new library and just import the originals?  I'm hoping that won't b that far off my original library event wise.

That's what I would do.

Cool thanks!