So my computers been running really slowly the last couple of weeks, and been crashing down (or I have been forced to restart it alot)…
I came across my iPhoto (11) library, which wasn't working. When i opened it, it said something caused iPhoto not to work properly and it gave me a command (Hold down option and command and press on iPhoto), which gave me 4 options. They were something like 1) Rebuild Thumbnails 2) Repair database 3)Rebuild database and i don't remember the 4th one. None of the first 3 were working, iPhoto just crashed. So i choose the one called "Rebuild database", and it started doing that. When that was done, all my iPhoto pictures were gone. And i think i had about over 10.000 photos from many years… so its pretty annoying and extremely depressing, if i can't recover them. I never have figured out how to use "Time Machine", so i haven't backed it up on that i think….Do i have any other options? Can i in some way take my Macbook Pro back in time a couple of days and get my pictures back?
Would really help if you have an idea, or if you know that it's not possible, everything would help since I'm not the most technical girl when it comes Macbook Pro's and problems like this…
:))
MacBook – How to i get the iPhoto pictures back, when they are all deleted
crashgraphicsiphotomacbook prophotos
Related Question
- IPhone – How to get a list of all iPhone pictures that are imported to iPhoto
- MacOS – iPhoto has missing photos but they can’t be removed
- IPhoto lost files
- IPhone – Videos taken on the iPhone will not sync to the iPad
- How to sync EXIF data and date information from iPhoto to original files and flickr
- Accidentally deleted iPhoto and lost all of the photos, how can I get the photos back
- Delete images from Pictures folder? Are they redundant
Best Answer
First: Nothing is lost. Yet. It is only hidden from plain view.
Next, the file and menu names below might not be correct. I am doing this from a German OS, and I did not want to reboot just for the filenames.
iPhoto keeps your photos in a subfolder, named "iPhoto Library" of the "Pictures" folder in the user directory. You need to control-click that folder (it actually looks like a file, but it is a folder, trust me!)
Then you will see a popup menu, and the third entry from the top ("show database" or something like that) is what you need. It will open the folder and display its content. One of the subfolders is called "Database", another is called "Masters". The Masters folder contains more subfolders, one each for each year of photos. Inside you will find subfolders for the months and inside again for the days. There you will find all your unchanged photos. If you rotated, cropped or modified them in any way, those photos are in the Database folder. I can only encourage you to explore them and copy all what you want to preserve to an external drive, so it can be added to iPhoto again.
But please fix the cause of the slowness and the crashes first! If your hard drive is dying, make a full copy and work on that to recover your photos.