Nasty iPhoto problem

[jcarter]

I have 4 iPhoto libraries, and when I am in the one with dog pictures, I go to events, and click upon one event, then I have a picture of Lilly picked out and double click on it to bring it up large.
It expands into a big round blurry icon!  Or if I try to drag a picture off onto the desktop which I do all the time. It gives me that circle with a line thru it, saying 'oh, no you dont'.
In other words this is not good news. Its only appearing on one of my libraries. I hold the option key down so that I can choose the one to open.
Its never happened before!
What the heck is that large circle with this huge thing in it, picture here,
All the pictures and events are OK till I click on them.
Thanks,
Jane

Found that this is the only album which is trying to do "Faces" which I do not want to have.  It is trying to ID faces, and I cannot disable it. The other 3 albums dont do this. I wonder if this is part of the trouble.

[jcarter]

Googled 'How to disable Faces in iPhoto', wow there is NO WAY to do it, and there are pages and pages of people with that same problem that this one library of mine has. The other 3 libraries do not do Faces, just one of mine.
It grinds and grinds away as it scans for Faces which I have not used. There is no way to stop it from doing that unles you hit Pause, but it continues.
I held down Option+Command to rebuild the database for this one library, lets hope this helps this.
This makes me quite angry, as I use iPhoto all the time, and to have it give me this horrid exclamation point and grind away at Faces, is not what should be happening with no way to disable it.
I will bet the problem is related, or at least Faces could very well be causing this problem.

[jcarter]

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?t...=0&tstart=0
Seems like a very common problem, as this is just one of the many discussions of it.

And here is the sad story in this screenshot that I used with iPhoto Library Manager,

[jcarter]

I am adding this as I go along and hopefully am able to recover my HUGE album, its most of the pictures that we have taken from 2004 to 2008 at least.
They, thank god, are in my hard drive here on this Mac, and I am copying them all to a new folder, I still have tons of room on this new Mac, and I will go right to the Mac store and buy a 1TB or a 2TB external HD Monday morning!

So if this happens to anyone here, I would say that this is the best thing to do, make an EXTRA copy of all your photos and put them on an additional ext HD.

The 2TB G-drive is the one I want/need, the 1TB one has some serious issues according to the Amazon reviews.
http://www.amazon.com/G-Technology-G-DRIVE...7429&sr=8-2
WHEW!  Got em all saved!
Jane

[FLASH1296]

Ordinarily ONE iPhoto Library suffices, because it can contain any number of "albums"

However, what you need/want is iPhoto Buddy v 1.3.4;

an application specifically designed for managing multiple iPhoto libraries.

Go to:  http://www.iphotobuddy.com/

It is a perfectly composed Web Page. An exemplar for web page design —  I M H O that is.

Go on. Take a look. I'll wait.


"iPhoto Buddy allows you to use more than one Photo Library with Apple's iPhoto, and makes it easy to switch between them.  But first, each Library must be added to Buddy's Library List.

Your existing iPhoto Library (the Default Library) has been added to the Library List for you.  You can add additional existing Libraries, if you have them.  You can also create new (empty) Libraries and add them to the Library List.

To add an existing Library, simply drag it from the Finder and drop it on the Library List.

To create a new Library, choose File --> Create A New Library....  From the standard 'Save As' Dialog that appears, enter a name and location for your new Library, then click the 'Create' button.  iPhoto will launch and open your new, empty Library into which you can begin importing your photos.

To view and edit one of your Libraries with iPhoto, simply select it from the Library List and click the Launch Button.  iPhoto will launch and open the selected Library.

See the iPhoto Buddy Manual for more details."

[jcarter]

Thank you!
Ive heard of it, and heard its good. I shall get it and use it, though iPHoto Library Manager seems OK. I just hold down the Option key while starting iTunes and it lets me choose which library I want.
Buddy sounds like its got more goodies, so I should get it.

I managed to save all my missing pictures thank god, so I will create a new library with them.
Jane

[Paddy]

This is just one reason why I've never trusted iPhoto with my photos, I'm afraid. I use Lightroom which is superb - and it allows you to keep your photos wherever you want. I keep my photos filed by project - and even if my database goes toes up, my photos are exactly where I left them and fully accessible in whatever app I want to use. They're filed how I want to file them - not imported into multi-level folders within folders within folders like iPhoto does it. I know it costs more - but it's also a lot more powerful than iPhoto and if you're at all interested in photography (which you appear to be) it's well worth considering.

[jchuzi]

If you don't want to spend money for the full version of Photoshop, Photoshop Elements 9 is now available.

[jcarter]

Yes, I took a class in Lightroom and really really liked it.
Though the learning curve was different, not like PS or PSE.
I didnt realize that it had the storage capabilities as well. I just thought I fished them out of iPhoto.

I dont care what it costs, if it will not screw up like this one album with ALL our puppy pictures of Lilly!
I freaked out thinking they were gone.
That way of letting you see the thumbnails, and then giving that disgusting HUGE UGLY black exclamation point is enough to make me back off from iPhoto forever!
And not letting iPhoto users get rid of that grinding CPU using thing that Faces does, cant turn it off! Thank goodness it only effected the one album, and I sure am thinking that it could be the problem under it all for my sick album.
Jane

I use and love both PS and PSE, but they dont store your photos, they are just fun ways to process and play with your photos.

[Jack W]

I have never used iPhoto, and doubt I ever will.

I store all my photos in my DigiCams partition, and use GraphicConverter to display, in slide show, Browse, or whatever.
I store them in folders with date: YYMMDD and descriptor name. That way, they are easy to find and always accessible.

I also have superfolders if I have a bunch of pictures over several days or weeks, such as when I go to Sedona.

That way, I have full control of where they are and how I use them.

I hate when software (especially Apples - iTunes, iPhoto etc.) thinks it knows how I should store them, etc.

I can also use any software I wish to manipulate the pictures.

I also backup all my partitions on a regular basis — which reminds me, time to back up w/SuperDuper!!!!

FWIW, Jack

[jcarter]

So to accomplish this, every time I connect any of our cameras, or my iPhone. I could not go about importing to iPhoto, I could just use the folder on the desktop that appears and save this with all the pictures in it, naming and dating it properly.
This is what I used to do before I used iPhoto.

The reason I like iPhoto, is viewing them so easily, sorting them into events, looking at them as slideshows. iPhoto just seems so nice and easy.
But I think that I will save the folders of the new photos each and every time I get ready to import, and then pop these folders into my new External HD(think I will buy the G-Tech 2TB one).

Ive got to get this new ext HD, as the other one is full, and I will start using Time Machine or SuperDuper.  Which is best?

Thanks so much! this glitch with iPhoto sort of threw me for a loop, I spent a couple of hours in the middle of the night worrying about losing all my pictures of Lilly as a puppy and the grandkids. Though I do have all the best photos up on the web and most on the old Ext HD.

[gunug]

Thanks Jane for bringing this to my sleepy attention; I have an email in my work mailbox that would "seem" at first glance to be this very problem!  It's nice that someone else already has an answer for me!  I'm willing to bet, with other tools, that these photos can be rescued!  Not so oddly enough I use a program called Irfanview (PC's/XP) to rescue jpegs and such on network drives that the endusers  (MAC's) can't seem to get to!  I can reconvert or whatever and unless the corrupt image is pretty far gone I can get it back. . .if it is there is often rescanning or something that can be done to get it into the yearbook or newspaper or whatever!  Someone else in TS probably has a swiss-army tool for MAC's that will do what Irfanview does!  Please share!

[Paddy]

Jane, you can do far, far more with Lightroom re: storing, viewing etc. than you can do with iPhoto. It has superb editing/adjustment capabilities as well - I do very little in Photoshop these days.

Even using iPhoto, you DO have the option of saving your photos elsewhere on your hard drive as well and then importing them to iPhoto, but this of course will use twice the space. I wouldn't import them to the desktop though - choose somewhere in your Documents folder. I did that for a while before I had Lightroom and it was ok, but I much much prefer Lightroom's way of doing it. I save the photos wherever I want - I TELL Lightroom where they're going and it builds the database link to them. I can put that link there when I first import the photos from my camera cards (it seems like it's doing the same sort of thing that iPhoto does, except that you SPECIFY where you want the photos to go) or I can import the photos to a folder and then tell Lightroom to add them to the database later on.

That said, the new Photoshop Elements 9 does have an Organizer, though I don't think it gets the same high marks as Lightroom, judging by this review:
http://www.networkworld.com/reviews/2010/0...p-elements.html (I frankly don't need/want face recognition etc. - nor do I want the application making judgements about whether or not a photo is in focus!)

[jcarter]

Lightroom, I really should take that class again, it was superb!
And I had the 30 trial version.
Oh, I just found my saved lessons too.
I think thats the way to go.
Though I really love both PS and PSE.  Ive been using them for years, and not too sure about learning LR, as it did have a pretty good learning curve.
I found that when the class ended, I went right back to PS.

 Aperture got very good reviews, its $200.  It has that annoying Faces thing built in, I wonder if it can be disabled, as we cannot do in iPhoto.
I just keep thinking that I might not use either of these 2 programs as I am extremely happy with PS, and am very familiar with using it.
Its confusing, as all of them have their ups and downs, and iPhoto is free,,,,,,

Might take me a bit longer to decide.
Then there is Picassa, and Graphic Converter,,,,, which I have also.
Im just used to PS and iPhoto, habit as they say.

As long as I dont lose my photos, which really scared me at first, I will keep looking at the options.
Jane

[jcarter]

I just installed Google's Picasa, pretty darn good!
Its a bit like iPhoto, though you just cant drag a handfull of photos onto the desktop directly, you have to "open with" then "save as", but thats OK.

For my classes, I scan thru all the photos, and pick out the ones that I want to use, and instantly drag em onto the desktop. Thats another reason iPhoto was so nice and easy, but I guess between iPhoto and its missing chunks, and now Picasa, I will be able to do this although a bit slower.

I need to go thru the 3 year old Puppy albums, and its now slower, but darn glad they are still there!
This turned into a 2 day time sink, but at least I have all my photos back and viewable.
Jane

Trying to add everything that I am doing to restore all my iPhoto albums and pictures. It is now 'rebuilding thumbnail cache' and Ive recovered many of the puppy pictures into iPhoto that were missing from it.
I sure am feeling a bit better about this whole fiasco. And thank you all for helping. I will bookmark this thread and refer back to it, so if iPhoto throws another curve ball at us, I will have at least what we did to resurrect it!

More,  I picked out the folders which were all the ones which were missing, and created a new library, and am now importing the whole damn mess into it I dragged the 6 dated folders into iPhoto to the new library, named it rebuilt library. 10630 pictures to be exact.
Now I have to sort out the names of all these doggone duplicate libraries. Would love to know how to start over from scratch.