iPhoto does not find some photos.

Question

iPhoto does not find some photos.

I use a desktop iMac (20-inch, early 2008), OS 10.7.5.

The iPhoto search feature refuses to find some of my photos from a recent upload.

I have eight recent photos of a Crane Hawk in my iPhoto library. I imported them and then labeled them, adding tags, as I've done with 10's of thousands of other photos. I wanted to find them using the search feature rather than digging through a large Event, but when I enter the words "Crane Hawk," I quickly get the five other Crane Hawk photos I've taken over the years, including two even more recent, but not these 8 that I was looking for. I know what event they are in and when I took them, so with some more time, I can go find the photos. But I should be able to bring them up with all my other Crane Hawk photos with the same search.

When I looked further into this, it appears that most if not all of the photos from this same upload won't appear with a search (I have filed them in different events).

I've checked for odd characters, typed, and retyped the photo title, even copied the photo title and pasted it into the search field – and they still won't appear. When I search using the file name (which I find by hovering the pointer over the image title in the upper right), it comes up fine. The search function just can't see the title of any of these photos. When I added the words "Crane Hawk" to the description field of one of the photos, it appears iimmediately with the search, but there are about 500 photos from this recent upload that search won't find.

I've tried suggestions on adding the Pictures folder to the Spotlight privacy panel, then removing it, but that doesn't help (is the search function within iPhoto really Spotlight anyway?)

Thanks for your time.

Rich

iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.5)

Posted on Jan 17, 2014 4:45 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Yer_Man

Level 10

162,320 points

Jan 18, 2014 12:24 AM in response to Birdernaturalist

Option 1

Back Up and try rebuild the library: hold down the command and option (or alt) keys while launching iPhoto. Use the resulting dialogue to rebuild. Choose to Repair Database. If that doesn't help, then try again, this time using Rebuild Database.

If that fails:

Option 2

Download iPhoto Library Manager and use its rebuild function. (In early versions of Library Manager it's the File -> Rebuild command. In later versions it's under the Library menu.)

This will create an entirely new library. It will then copy (or try to) your photos and all the associated metadata and versions to this new Library, and arrange it as close as it can to what you had in the damaged Library. It does this based on information it finds in the iPhoto sharing mechanism - but that means that things not shared won't be there, so no slideshows, books or calendars, for instance - but it should get all your events, albums and keywords, faces and places back.

Because this process creates an entirely new library and leaves your old one untouched, it is non-destructive, and if you're not happy with the results you can simply return to your old one.

Regards

TD

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Answer 2

Jan 18, 2014 7:43 AM in response to Yer_Man

Thanks TD! Repair didn't work, but Rebuild under Option 1 did. It was slow, with nearly 41000 photos, especially with its having to re-esstablish the Flickr links, but it now finds all my photos.

Regards,

Rich

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