iTunes does not show my iPhoto photos and albums in iPod Photos tab

Question

iTunes does not show my iPhoto photos and albums in iPod Photos tab

When I connect my iPod to my Mac, iTunes displays the iPod device. However, under the Photos tab, when I select the "Sync photos from" checkbox, and select "iPhoto" from the dropdown list, the "All photos and albums" radio button below it shows "(0 photos)". Also, the "Selected albums (0 photos)" radio button is grayed out, and doesn't display any of my albums or photos in the list below.

So, basically, iTunes acts as if I don't have anything in iPhoto at all. I did an experiment, and moved my iPhoto Library out of the Pictures folder, launched iPhoto, and created a new iPhoto Library. I also added some albums and photos. These appeared in iTunes just fine! But when I moved my original iPhoto Library folder back, iTunes went back to displaying nothing.

I also tried rebuilding my iPhoto libary (launch holding down the Cmd-Opt keys, and selecting all items to rebuild. This did not fix anything in iTunes.

MacBook Pro Mac OS X (10.4.8)

Posted on Feb 1, 2007 10:42 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Yer_Man

Level 10

162,260 points

Feb 2, 2007 7:54 AM in response to Scott Z Cunningham

Scott

Welcome to the Apple Discussions

This can happen if you have non-ascii characters in the album names, titles or keywords.

Regards

TD

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Answer 2

Feb 3, 2007 12:44 AM in response to Yer_Man

Wha??? Are you sure about that?

How would I have entered non-ascii characters into my photo names, tags, albums, etc? Well, nevermind that. How would I SEARCH through all my 6846 photos for the ones that DO have non-ascii characters? Is there a wild-card search string that I could enter would return only photo names containing those types of characters?

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Answer 3

Feb 6, 2007 11:05 PM in response to Scott Z Cunningham

I have the exact same problem and I've been struggling to solve it for a long time with no success. I think I've narrowed it down to somehting wrong with my actual iphoto library. This is becuase other iphoto libraries that I have (I have several) show up fine when synching with my ipod (I often switch between libraries). But my main iphoto library (with about 21,000 photos in it) just doesn't get recognized when I open itunes and try and synch it to my ipod. No albums show up and it indicates that I have 0 photos. I have spent countless hours trying to trouble shoot this and reading discussion threads to no avail. I really want to synch these photos to my ipod and am hoping to potentially do the same with a macTV. This library is too big with way too much meta data to scrap and rebuild. ANY HELP in this matter would be VERY appreciated.

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Answer 4

Yer_Man

Level 10

162,260 points

Feb 7, 2007 12:37 AM in response to George Wesely

George

Have you checked for non-ascii characters in your Album Names, Picture Titles or Keywords? Specifically, be wary of any characters apart from the 326 letters of the alphabet and the basic 0 - 9. !@£$%^&*() can all cause problems.

Also, have a look at this thread,

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=778068&tstart=0

About half way down there's a post from Dave E which contains the following:

Sal, I had a similar problem once. I'm sorry you had to go through so much of this but maybe what I discovered can still help you.
- View your albumdata.xml file in some text editor, like TextEdit.
- Do a Find (cmd f) for "List of Keywords"
- The XML under that looks kind of like this:
<dict>
<key>1</key>
<string>Favorite</string>
<key>6</key>
<string>Birthday</string>
<key>3</key>
</dict>
You will probably have more keywords, this is just an example. But see the format - everything that has <something> ends with </something>.
When I had the problem, the example above looked like:
<dict>
<key>1</key>
<string>Favorite <key>6</key>
<string>Birthday</string>
<key>3</key>
</dict>
Notice the line return and </string> are missing for "Favorite". This happened to one of my keywords, and I don't know what caused it, but I deleted that keyword (and the one after it) from within iPhoto's preferences, and typed them in again.
The problem went away. Maybe some bogus character got into the keywords to make the XML go bad.

Regards

TD

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Answer 5

Feb 7, 2007 2:29 AM in response to Yer_Man

Terrance -
thanks for the response. I did remove a few non-ascii characters (I had a couple '&'s in some albums) but the problem still persists - i.e. itunes still does not recognize my iphoto libarary in the ipod photo synch tab. I did see that thread myself earlier in my search for a solution and saw no anomolies in the text. I actually rebuilt the .xml file per the recommendations of another thread. Still the same problem. Any more suggestions? Oh yeah, the photos appear fine when accessed thru the media palette in other iLife apps - such as iDVD and Pages. The problem is only in iTunes.

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Answer 6

Yer_Man

Level 10

162,260 points

Feb 7, 2007 3:12 AM in response to George Wesely

George

Try trash the com.apple.iphoto.plist and the com.apple.iTunes.plist and the com.apple.iLIfe.plist files from the home / library / preferences folder

Did you rebuild the xml file after changing the keywords?

Regards

TD

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Answer 7

Feb 7, 2007 10:52 AM in response to Yer_Man

Again, thanks for the response. I did both of your two suggestions and still itunes does not recognize the iphoto library. See screen shot. The funny thing is that other iPhoto libraries (I sometimes switch between libraries) show up fine. But my main one (th big one that I really wnat to synch with) is not showing up. This is why I'm thinking it's something specific to that library. The photos and albums DO show up in the Media Palette in other iapps - it's just in the itunes ipod phot synch tab where it's not reading. ARGGGG!

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