lost photos! foolishly messed with files in finder and now empty thumbs

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lost photos! foolishly messed with files in finder and now empty thumbs

here is the deal. i thought i was organizing photo files in the finder and instead i was messing with iphoto. now all those files i moved around are blank thumbs in iphoto. i can still see thumbs in finder adn view photos in the default viewer. i've tried to reimport the thumbs but it doesn't work. i get the error message when i do that. any body think they can help? am i making sense?

g4

Posted on Jan 18, 2007 5:38 AM

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Answer 1

Jan 18, 2007 5:49 AM in response to macness

sympathy. Almost every photo in my library went blank - I don't know why -
but, in trying to rebuild they seem not to be totally vanished. Arghh...

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Answer 2

Jan 18, 2007 7:08 AM in response to macness

Hi macness,
If it is at all possible, move the files back to where they were. Can you tell me exactly what you moved and about how many?
If your library is not that large it might be easier to create a new one and import the photos again.

Close iPhoto
Rename your messed up iPhoto Library to "iPhoto Library_old"
Drag this library to your desktop
Hold down the Option key and launch iPhoto
This is the window you will get
Create a new library or choose a library to open
Choose to create a new library
Once this new empty library is open it is time to import the images from your old library
Go to File>add to library
Navigate to the old library on your desktop and highlight it in the window, then click the "import" button.
iPhoto will start importing the images from your old library
This is what to expect:
Your images will be imported in nice dated rolls. (make sure your view is set to sort by rolls to see it) There are a couple of caveats to this. You will get rolls named "Originals" These rolls will contain your video clips and your original images that you had edited. If you had RAW files they would be in those rolls too (I don't do RAW, so I don't know for sure) Delete what you don't want from those rolls. You will also get the jpeg pointer files to your video clips imported. They will just be jpegs and will not point to the video clips anymore as iPhoto made new ones when the clips were imported again. You can delete those. they should be in a roll right next to the newly imported video clips so they are not hard to find. The thumbnail files don't get imported as iPhoto makes new ones when the images are imported.
Once all you images have been imported, check through the library and make sure everything looks ok.
You can now start making your Albums, and do your keywords or any other organizational steps.
You can also delete the old library on the desktop.
It is also a good time to backup this new library to CD/DVD by burning the iPhoto LIbrary folder in the Finder, or copying the iPhoto Library folder to an external drive formatted for Macs, or copying the iPhoto LIbrary folder to an iPod.
Good luck!

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