I didn't update iPhoto before updating to El Capitan. iPhoto is not showing (even hidden) in my app purchases. How can I get my photos back and into the new photos app?

That means you never purchased iPhoto on the App Store. There isn't a thing you can do about it since the only solution requires that you had once purchased iPhoto from the App Store.

To get your photos into the new Photos app simply open your existing iphoto Library with Photos.

Hold down the option (or alt) key key and launch Photos. From the resulting menu select 'Choose Library'

I'm dealing with the same issue on someone else's iMac, and tried that approach. The import routine in Photos only gets to 25% before throwing an error message that says that "the iphoto library is inconsistent". No library repair option is given.

The old iPhoto app won't run, and nothing shows up under 'purchased apps' in the app store, even when the old iPhoto app has been thrown away and the Mac restarted.

The Mac runs El Capitan, the iphoto (library) version is 8.1.2

There is no update for iPhoto 8.1.2. It's too old and newer versions are no longer sold.

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.

Many thanks for your prompt response, and apologies for not mentioning that I found a reference to iPhoto library manager in another one of your posts.

When I tried to rebuild the library using iPhoto library manager, it exited with an error saying:

"iPhoto library manager is unable to open the library "Default library" (incompatible iPhoto version). The version of iPhoto you have installed (8.1.2) is not compatible with the version of OS X on the machine (10.11.2)."

It then refers to its own support function for instructions on how to update iPhoto.

The preferred method they give is to get the App store to reinstall a version of iPhoto, with instructions on how to unhide purchases and how to force the app store to rescan the applications folder. None of this worked. The alternative suggested by iPhoto library manager is to roll back the system version and try again, but since I'm supporting someone remotely, that's highly undesirable.

At this point, I think I'm going to try the following:

1. Send a copy of the app bundle of the last version of iPhoto (9.6.1) from my own machine and see whether that will run and import the library, and then move everything to photos

2. Transfer a copy of the library to my own machine and open up the package to see whether I can get at the raw image assets, and import those into a Photos library

and import the library,

Don't do that. You just open it, not import it.

Hi isitonacid Can you please advise how you got on? The absence of any Like, Helpful etc or reply leaves an uncertainty... Unless you're tripping of course...