Iphoto will not open it says "Your photo library is either in use by another application or has become unreadable" Please help!!

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Level 1

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Iphoto will not open it says "Your photo library is either in use by another application or has become unreadable" Please help!!

I am not sure on what version I have of iPhoto or how I find out. I am sorry I am not totally familiar with a Mac system yet.

When my wife was downloading the photos from her new iPhone she was given the option to delete the photos form the device after download; she clicked yes and during the deleting process the battery of the Mac died!! The problem has occurred ever since this happened.

I have used the Option and command key and open iPhoto selected the top option but this seemingly did nothing; tried the third option and this just gave me a colour wheel for a few seconds and then held on the same screen prompt doing nothing saying about time machine was doing something (sorry cannot remember the full message) I left it for up to 30 mins on this and nothing happened. I have seen some suggestions for iPhoto manager app to download but wondered if there was anything else anyone could suggest; I unfortunately do not keep back ups of photos so am desperately hoping they haven't been lost!!

MacBook Pro, OS X Mavericks (10.9.5)

Posted on Aug 28, 2015 1:30 AM

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Answer 1

Yer_Man

Level 10

162,260 points

Aug 28, 2015 1:43 AM in response to ben81281

Your next step - as you have no back up - is to use iPhoto Library Manager. The upside is that using it a: may work and b: because it uses copies for everything, it will not make things worse.

Download iPhoto Library Managerand 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.

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