Hello i recently bought my wife a exernal harddrive because she had so many photos on her mac that is was slowing it down. She tried to open them up this morning and it said they were all in .ipmeta format on the ex hd all photos have been deleted on her mac to free memory. Someone PLEASE tell me all these pictures can still be recovered and how?!!?!?
Thanks!
iPhoto '11, iOS 7.0.4
The first question is, what backups do you have?
i dont know if we have any?? backups of what?
If you don't know whether you have backups, you don't have them. In that case, you have a serious problem. Anything you do may reduce your chances of recovering the data (if it's been deleted.) Data recovery is a job for professionals. Their services are very expensive.
As a first resort, I suggest you make a "Genius" appointment at an Apple Store to find out whether the photos have really been deleted. If they have, you may be given some suggestions for further steps. Until then, you should shut down the computer.
so basically my only hope is a backup of the computer?
It's too late to back up. I don't know whether you've lost data or not, and I am not willing to make suggestions when you have no backups and may be in a recovery situation. As I wrote above, anything you do could ruin the chances of recovery.
That files extension is the iPhoto Metadate extension. Read this.
http://www.fileinfo.com/extension/ipmeta
Then open a Finder window and go to your Home Folder, your UserName folder, then to the pictures folder and look for a file named iPhoto Library.photolibrary. Right click on it and select "Show Package Contents". That will open to something that looks like this.
Look for a folder called Masters and open it. If there are any image files left on your Mac the originals will be in that folder. Copy that complete folder to the external drive.
.ipmeta files help!!
