7,000+ photo library missing

Question

7,000+ photo library missing

I have been unable to find my 7000+ iPhoto library and I am terrified that they're gone. To save disk space on my SSD, I pointed iPhoto to a library on my external disk, which is backed up on a weekly basis using using Carbon Copy Cloner. I have asked for help from their support desk but they said to ask Apple where the library might have been moved to. One thing I did recently was delete something called Mobilesync from my SSD after I found it had taken up my entire SSD. But iPhoto still opened ok after that. Now all my photos are gone. Please help. Thanks.

Edit: iPhoto '11 (v9.4.3) running on Mid-2009 Macbook Pro 13 OS X 10.8.5

Posted on Sep 26, 2013 7:10 PM

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Answer 1

LarryHN

Level 10

106,110 points

Sep 26, 2013 7:26 PM in response to SavedByTechnology

1 - iPhoto does not move (or have the capaiblituy to move) a library - all it can do is read a library baased on where you tell it to look

2 - What does "unable to find" mean? When you look on the external drive using teh finder is it there? Is it on the clone volume? When yhou launch iPhoto with the option key depressed what do you see in the select library window

3 - are you running Time Machine in additions to CCC?

LN

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Answer 2

Sep 26, 2013 7:35 PM in response to LarryHN

Hi Larry,

2 - The only iPhoto library I see anywhere on the Mac, including the external drive (it's housed in the old DVD bay) is one with a file size of 7.26GB. But when I open that library with iPhoto, I only see 250 photos. That doesn't seem to add up though. I noticed the photos were missing tonight when I went to open iPhoto and it mentioned something about "upgrading". I haven't upgraded anything though.

3 - No, only CCC

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Answer 3

LarryHN

Level 10

106,110 points

Sep 26, 2013 8:36 PM in response to SavedByTechnology

Be sure iPhoto is pointing to the library ont eh external drive and Back up your iPhoto library, Depress and hold the option (alt) and command keys and launch iPhoto - rebuild your iPhoto library database

LN

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Answer 4

Sep 27, 2013 5:10 AM in response to LarryHN

Thanks for trying to help Larry, but that didn't work. I saw that elsewhere and tried a few times with no luck. I think I'm toast.

What I believed happened is CCC overwrote an archived back up that contained the library iPhoto was pointed to. Stupid I know. When I had this issue last year, that was a resolution I found in another discussion. I just never copied that library to another folder on the external drive.

I still don't know why I see a 7.26GB library in Finder, yet only see 250 photos. At an average of 4MB per photo, that should only come to 1GB. I have an appointment at the Genius Bar this morning. Perhaps they can show me the error of my ways.

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Answer 5

LarryHN

Level 10

106,110 points

Sep 27, 2013 7:09 AM in response to SavedByTechnology

FWIT I love CCC but I also love Time Machine - I rung Time Machine to give me a time based backup and CCC to give me a daily bootable clone - both are valuable - the problem with CCC is that unless you catch the problem before the next cycle (24 hours in my case) you miss your oppertunity

LN

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Answer 6

Sep 27, 2013 4:03 PM in response to LarryHN

I hear ya. I tried Time Machine a few years ago and wasn't too impressed. I'll continue using CCC, if only because I'm comfortable using it. It's my own fault for not looking closely enough at where the library was located. Genius Bar wasn't any help, so I bought a data recovery program. After 60%, it's recovered only 54k+ JPEG's...sheesh. It'll probably take me a year to weed out the duplicates!

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