iphoto/mac Help

my mac seems to have deleted my iphoto library it says it cant find it :thinking: . i did a spotlight search for ‘iphoto library’ and it came up with nothing :frowning: i looked in my trash and its not there can anyone help?

If your files are deleted rather than misplaced, here’s a link:

iPhoto looks for your library in your Pictures folder, under iPhoto Library. If you kept your library in a different location you’ll have to search elsewhere.

Do you have your files backed up? If not, today’s a good day to think about backups. This is why they’re good to have.

You can also search your hard drive for all .jpg files, and see what turns up that way. Good luck!

its cause its a mac…

sorry that was pointlessly harsh. I feel bad :frowning:

but all these mac lovers here i felt i had to do something.

usefull comment : " do a search for all *.jpg or *jpeg files and you should be able to retrieve them. Hopefully it just deleted your index not the actual pictures. But who knows… macs work in funny ways :stuck_out_tongue:

Haha, no.

I will confess, I absolutely HATE iPhoto. Every other program on OSX is amazing. But iPhoto has got to be the worst photo program out there. I only use iPhoto to upload my photos, but then I export them elsewhere and delete my library over and over again.

Anyone use a different photo program on their macs?

Okay, be stupid!

The iPhoto Library is a folder, which contains both the database and all the files. PCs work like Macs (study some history; claims can be legitimately made in both directions). Now Windows calls them Folders (the Mac always did), but they used to be called Directories. Today’s Macs work like Unix. Unix is to the Mac OS what DOS used to be to Windows. All Mac OSX boxes are Unix boxes, all the way down to the iPhone.

Hopefully Gumba has had some success. If your files are definitely deleted, the sooner you get some file recovery software and use it the better. The longer you wait the more of your files will be overwritten by using the computer.

I tried iPhoto when it first came out, and also stopped using it pretty quickly. At the time, my number of photos would have pushed its database limit, which was an immediate indicator that it was not the right software for a serious photographer like me. Also I didn’t like the way it stores everything in one giant database that your’e not supposed to mess with from outside the program. Many improvements have been made to the program since then, but it’s not for me. Interestingly, iTunes does basically the same thing with your music and video files, and I’m fine with that system for those. I have greater need for control with my photos though.

If you don’t take large amounts of pictures and want to do the typical things people do with their photos easily, it can be great for you. Don’t forget to back up your pictures of course, digital files, in their way, are much more fragile than film negatives! But on the up-side, they’re much, much easier to copy. You should have at least three copies of every picture you care about, and they shouldn’t all be in the same room.

I will use iPhoto for making photo books, and a few other things. Otherwise, I use iView MediaPro, a database for asset management. It works great, but unfortunately the company was swallowed up by Microsoft a couple of years ago. They recently released the first Microsoft-branded version, which is called Microsoft Expression Media. Ever heard of it? I only did because I received emails as a registered user of iView.

I was offered a free upgrade to the new program. This offer came with almost no information about how the new version differed from the one I already had. I was skeptical. Microsoft can ruin a version 3.0 product by turning it into a version 1.0 product. The web site was confusing and lacking in lots of basic information. I couldn’t find a features list. Apparently the new product had no manual, other than an MS Word doc you could download if you knew where to look. On the online forum they’d set up, many users complained their activation codes didn’t work and they couldn’t run it. Others reported bugginess.

So sad. I love iView MediaPro, but the Microsoft replacement so far doesn’t seem to have a future. Professional users are probably jumping ship left and right, to Apple’s Aperture (Mac only) or Adobe’s Lightroom (Win or Mac). I will probably go with Lightroom eventually. As a member of NAPP I get lots of articles and tips on Lightroom as well as Photoshop. It sounds pretty awesome.

Thats exactly what I don’t like about it. If you touch anything…all your pictures become corrupt and you have to import them all again.

I actually don’t own a digital camera. So I’m doing just fine without iPhoto right now haha. But I’ll probably own one in the near future. Right now I just export to the desktop and then store my photos in folders that I can manipulate in any way I wish :slight_smile:

I drag and drop my photos right off the memory card. iPhoto never impressed me, and coming from the Linux world, I’m happy storing my pics in /home/evil/Pictures/year/downloadDate

Makes backing up easier too :slight_smile: