Why can't we restore a single photo in iPhoto anymore?

The loss of this functionality has been anoying and I sincerely hope that Apple brings it back someday. It makes Time Machine a lot less useful for customers and also potentially leads to the loss of more data. It used to be that you could restore a single image, say that was acidentally deleted. Now if you were to restore the entire iPhoto Library with Time Machine, you'd get the one image back but lose every other image you added since then. That make no sense. Of course Time Machine will ask if you want to overwrite thr iPhoto Library or duplicate and keep the original, but how many people are going to know they should keep the original? And if you have a large library you may not have the space. Even if you did dupe the Library you would then need to Open the restored Library (hold option while opening iPhoto and select the Library), find the image you want back, copy it out of the old Library, quit iPhoto, re-open iPhoto with the existing Library, re-add the photo you want to restore. Way too many steps.

There is another workaround that I will share here, but it too is too complex for many people. Bottom line Apple needs to bring back the old method for restoring iPhotos using Time Machine.

Here's how I would restore a single image in iPhoto with Time Machine. I personally also make an extra backup of the iPhoto Library before using this method, just in case.

1. Go to ~/Pictures/iPhoto Library
2. Right+Click the iPhoto Library and choose 'Show Package Contents'
3. Click the 'Originals' alias
4. Now you should see a bunch of folders organized by year
5. Activate Time Machine
6. Browse back to find the image you want to restore. The folders go by year > month > day. After that the folder and image names are cryptic, but you can use the previews to find the image you want to restore.
7. Select it and restore it with Time Machine.
8. I would then move the image out of the ~/Pictures/iPhoto Library package folder and re-add it manually to iPhoto.