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Iphoto crashed and deleted partial events

I'm really sorry, there was a similar thread and I accidentally marked it as closed. It had gone nowhere and I include a summary and a link at the bottom.

I run iphoto 9.5.1 on 10.9.5 and have no good backups. (Please don't be judgmental, I know I should have upgraded and backed up...). Is there a way for me to get my events, edits, titles and other metadata back?


2 days ago iphoto crashed, and could not restart. When holding option-command while starting iphoto did not find the library (much less prompt to rebuild) I installed iPhoto Library Manager which found the library without even an error message but only found a fraction of the photos (about 1500 out of 6000). Photos seemed to be missing out of every event, movies were truncated. The most recent event was missing.


I checked in the filesystem, Pictures/iPhoto Library.photolibrary/Masters/2014/05/10/... the photos were there and seem to be grouped reasonably, probably by import. A subsequent iPhoto Library Manager recover with scavenge orphaned photos got a lot of photos back, I suppose all that were in events plus what was in the trash. (Even after deleting duplicates I have way more than before.) They are in daily folders now, I have almost 500 instead of 90 and lost titles and most edits.


From the thread iphoto 9.5.1 orphaned most of my photos

  • The damaged library is on the system drive, in ~/Pictures named iPhoto Library.photolibrary and shows in the finder with the fan icon (see below)
  • Control option double clicking the damaged library results in iPhoto trying to repair the rebuilt library and then trying to import the damaged library into the rebuilt one
  • The rebuilt library does not contain an "old masters" folder, at least not after a savaged the orphaned photos.
  • I did not run an upgrade on the damaged library or upgrade iPhoto recently
  • it crashed while running faces.
  • drwxr-xr-x@ 17 myuserid staff 578 Feb 4 01:11 iPhoto Library.photolibrary
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MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8)

Posted on Feb 4, 2016 10:25 AM

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4 replies

Feb 4, 2016 11:29 AM in response to wailuasonja

The simplest solution is to restore the backup copy of your library that was made just prior to this occurring.


Otherwise try this:


Using iPhoto Library Manager to Rebuild Your iPhoto Library


1 - download iPhoto Library Manager and launch.>Click on the Add Library button,

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2 - select the library you want to add from those in the selection window.


3 - make sure that in the rebuild window the checkbox "Scavange orphaned photos" is checked.


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4 - now that the library is listed in the left hand pane of iPLM, click on your library and go to the Library ➙ Rebuild Library menu option


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5 - in the next window name the new library and select the location you want it to be placed. Click on the Create button.


Note 1: This creates a new library based on the LIbraryData.xml file in the library and will recover Events, Albums, keywords, titles and comments. However, books, calendars, cards and slideshows will be lost.

Note 2: Your current library will be left untouched for further attempts at a fix if so desired.

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Iphoto crashed and deleted partial events

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