Most (not all) of my iphoto library is missing after El Cap Upgrade

Hi Leonie,

Thanks for the suggestion, but I am absolutely 100 % sure that I am opening the right Library, on /External Drive/jenny/Pictures/iPhoto Library. So opening the wrong library is definitely _not_ the problem.

I have repeatedly double checked this by re-launching iPhoto while holding down the Option key and navigating to the right library.

The library at this location still shows as over 500 Gb, which is obviously more than 2978 pictures, and when I "Show Package Contents", I can see the Originals for 2005-2016 are still there.

Any other ideas?

P.s. this is very definitely NOT solved.

Wait. How is this labeled as "Solved"?? It sure as heck is not solved.

léonie wrote:

I tried repairing the database. No luck. Still 2978 photos visible.

How did you try to rebuild the database ? By holding down the ⌥⌘ keys while double-clicking iPhoto or by double-clicking the library? Double-click the library, if you did not have done it this way.

I've tried both. Absolutely no difference in outcome. The very first time that I tried to repair the database it found 898 pictures (more on that later). But every time since then it has found zero new pictures.

I have repeatedly double checked this by re-launching iPhoto while holding down the Option key and navigating to the right library. So that is definitely not the problem.

That does not ensure that iPhoto will open the library on the external drive. If it cannot open that library, it will simply default to a library in the Pictures folder on your internal drive without telling you so. The menu from the title bar will show which library is open. Or if you select a photo from the library and use the command "File > Reveal in Finder".

That's a new trick for me, thanks! Unfortunately, "Reveal in Finder" confirms that the few pictures visible in iPhoto really are opening from the expected library at /External Drive/jenny/Pictures/iPhoto Library.

Does your iPhoto Library have a event or album with a name like "recovered photos"? When iPhoto repairs a library and finds orphaned photos in the Masters folder, it will collect them in a "Recovered items" event.

There are three "Recovered Photos" folders, so I must have done this before. Recovered Photos is empty. Recovered Photos 2 is empty. Recovered Photos 3 has 898 pictures in it, and they appear to be the pictures iPhoto found the very first time that I ran Repair Database.

You already looked in the obvious places - the Trash, or enabled the Hidden Photos in the View menu?

Yes, there's nothing in the trash.

Yes, I enabled view hidden, and nothing changed.

The library at this location still shows as over 500 Gb, which is obviously more than 2978 pictures, and when I "Show Package Contents", I can see the Originals for 2005-2016 are still there.

Are the originals in a folder "Masters" or a folder "Old Masters"?

The original .JPG files are in "Masters". There's also a soft link folder labeled "Originals". There is no "Old Masters" Folder.

Inside of Masters, there are folders labeled 2002 through 2016. Inside of one of the years that is currently invisible (2007) there are roughly three dozen folders labeled "Roll ###", each of which contains between one and three hundred .JPG files. Same for all of the other years that are currently invisible. The pictures are here, there's just something fundamentally broken in how iPhoto is looking them up?

Sigh. I downloaded iPLM, installed, and launched. It found the problem library immediately, with the same 2978 pictures in it. So I launched rebuild. iPhoto Library Manager started to rebuild. The progress bar populated to about 10% in the first hour, claiming to have "Scavenged 19,260 photos...". Which was promising.

Then the progress bar stopped moving, and there has been no evidence of further progress in the next two hours. Still 19,260.

So I'm sitting here watching the spinning wheel of doom, feeling furiously impotent. I will post again once it finishes, or I get to dinnertime, whichever comes first. Fingers still reluctantly crossed that this works, but this is roughly where I was last night when I tried to just salvage a copy of the Library from my Time Machine backup before the El Cap upgrade. The Time Machine salvaged Library suffered from exactly the same 2978 picture problem, so I've run out of optimism that I can salvage the metadata from this disaster.

Okay. I can't quite believe how long it took, but iPhoto Library Manager did finally manage to salvage the corrupted library. It took most of the weekend to run, finishing sometime on Sunday. It turns out that there were more than 70,000 missing pictures in my library. So I paid fatcat a well earned $30 for their software. I'm still quite disappointed in Apple for (a) losing more than 90% of my photo library during a routine OS upgrade and (b) not providing any products that could solve the problem that they created.

That's exactly

léonie wrote:

when I tried to just salvage a copy of the Library from my Time Machine backup before the El Cap upgrade.

Try to go further back in time - to the time before the 2978 photos you are seeing now.

That's exactly what I had done: I had the full library accessible before the El Cap upgrade. El Cap broke my library, and restoring it from TimeMachine taken before the upgrade didn't manage to un-break it.