iPhoto Keeps Killing My Library!

April 27, 2010 6:53 AM

iPhoto Help Filter: About six months ago I opened iPhoto to the horror of little black boxes instead of events. Photos were exhibiting the same problem. I had ample backups so I browsed back in time to find the version of my iPhoto library that wasn't corrupt. I restored it. It happened again. I restored it. You guessed it... it keeps happening.

I don't know if this is a 'standard' iPhoto library corruption problem or what. The files and everything are all there if you inspect the library.

Check out screen shots of the problem here and here.

What's going on here? Last time I restored the file, I decided to do nothing (add no pictures, make no changes) and just watch the file (load it daily). After about a week, it's happening again.

Stats:

iPhoto Library file ~15.6gig
Mac OS, version 10.5.8
iPhoto '08, version 7.1.5
Mozy and SugarSync are running on this (and other) files

posted by shew to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

Almost certainly a sync issue. iPhoto is one of the last remaining Mac applications that stores vital information in the resource fork of a file. The most obvious symptoms of lost resource forks in iPhoto are all your thumbnails turning into little outline boxes, and they don't come back even if you do rebuild thumbnails.
posted by Mwongozi at 7:51 AM on April 27, 2010

Temporary workaround if you need to access your photos: Install Picasa (assuming you're on an Intel Mac). It will use iPhoto's index of images, and import what it can from tags etc. (I think - not sure), but it will access the iPhoto data as read-only. It should generate its own thumbnails though.

I prefer it to iPhoto myself, because iPhoto doesn't play nicely with multiple computers, while Picasa will auto-detect changes (additions/deletions made outside of the program) without freaking out. Picasa also does not try to move my images, just indexes them in place.
posted by caution live frogs at 11:04 AM on April 27, 2010