Can my iphoto be fixed safely

May 1, 2007 9:40 PM

Mac OS X iPhoto Help - I disconnected my firewire drive (where I store my photos) without closing iPhoto or dismounting the drive - Now iphoto can't fint the pictures.

I store my pictures on a firewire drive and mistakenly disconnected the drive. Now when I open iphoto it rebuilds thumbnails each time but they are all blank. I assume that it doesn't know where to look. I am in the middle of Australia on vacation and want to be very careful about this because I have no backup. The pictures are on the firewire drive because I checked and can look at them using preview. Anybody know a way to fix this that is safe? I am OS X and iphoto 6.0.4. Thanks ahead of time!

posted by snowjoe to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Apple Docs: About testing and repairing a disk
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 10:39 PM on May 1, 2007

Best answer: Two things to check:

1. Hold down the option key when launching iPhoto. Use the resulting dialog to re-select your iPhoto library. Anything?
2. Command-Shift-G and then type '/Volumes' and click okay. Is there a folder icon with the same name as your FireWire drive? If an application or process mistakenly thinks that a volume is mounted, it will create a folder hierarchy in /Volumes to write whatever it needs to. When you plug the drive back in, it actually gets mounted as VolumeName1 (or something like that) which changes the path to the files

posted by nathan_teske at 11:26 PM on May 1, 2007

You want to rebuild the iPhoto Library. It's not hard ... but don't blow off this step: back up your photos (iphoto library) right now. All your photos should still be on the external drive, just buried somewhere in the folder hierarchy. If you don't already have backups on CD, at the very *least* select the current iPhoto library, Command-click and compress it into a .zip file as a backup. In case something goes really bad in the rebuilding process, you can at least take that when you get home, open it up and autopsy it, and maybe get your photos back. I'd burn it to a CD ASAP, too.

(If you're keeping the sole copy of your photos on an external hard drive, just as an aside, you are really asking for trouble. I would modify your downloading-from-the-camera workflow to include an IMMEDIATE backup-to-CD step, because otherwise you never know when that drive might fail and take all your photos with it.)

Anyway, once you have a backup of the existing (presumably broken) library, follow the instructions to force a rebuild.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:30 PM on May 1, 2007

I have an idea what's wrong, but I don't know how to fix it without sending you to use Terminal. :-/

Let's say your hard drive is named "Fred". Open Terminal.app (it is in the Utilities folder). Type "ls -al /Volumes" (without the quotes) and hit return. My guess is you will find both a "Fred" and a "Fred 1" (assuming you have now plugged the hard drive back in).

If I'm right, the fix is fairly easy. (And if I'm not right, please don't mess with Terminal unless you know what you're doing!)
Quit all applications except Terminal.
Eject and unplug your external hard drive.
In Terminal.app, type "mv /Volumes/Fred /Volumes/Fred.bogus" (again, without the quotes) and hit return.
Plug in your external hard drive again.
Launch iPhoto. See if it knows where your photos are now.

I've tried to be careful to give you commands in Terminal that should be entirely benign. If you have troubles, let me know and I'll do what I can to help.
posted by browse at 8:22 AM on May 2, 2007

Response by poster: Thanks Nathan. The option key worked. My question is why I couldn't easily figure that out by myself rather than use mefi member's valuble time up! I do have a backup of all of my photos except for the few hundred I have taken on this trip to Australia. Based on advice received here I have duplicates of these pictures on my internal now as a temp backup until I get home. Thanks again to all. Problem solved.
posted by snowjoe at 1:32 AM on May 3, 2007