Pigs, Gourds, and Wikis

Woke up to a lovely morning tweet: "@lizcastro Done.  Update available now in App Store that supports library books." from @micahsb, a developer and entrepreneur. He was referring to the fact that the new version of their Bluefire Reader app for the iPad can display Adobe DRM'd EPUB format ebooks that you've taken out of the library.

And it works! I connected to my library, and quickly did a search for Adobe ePUB, “took out” and then downloaded The Mysterious Benedict Society, which we're in the process of reading, and clicked OK when I was asked if I wanted to open the file in Adobe Digital Editions. This converts the download file into a Bluefire-compatible Adobe DRM'd EPUB file and places it in the Digital Editions folder, within the Documents folder (or My Documents folder on a PC).



Next, I opened iTunes, connected and selected my iPad, chose the App panel, selected Bluefire at the bottom of the window in the File Sharing section, clicked Add..., chose the book file from where it was copied—in the Digital Editions folder within the (My) Documents folder—, and then clicked Sync.



I then opened Bluefire Reader on my iPad, and there was my book! Absolutely lovely.

There are a lot of things that have changed about me since I was 15, but wanting to be a teacher has remained constant. OK, it's true I didn't enjoy teaching high-school Spanish (at Princeton Day School in 1986!), but I have always loved explaining thing and feel lucky that I figured out a way to make a living at it.

There is one thing that has eluded me since my days teaching Spanish though: standing up in front of a live audience. I've dabbled with a screencast here and there, but though I've been invited to talk at several different conferences, I've always shied away from to speaking in public. Until now.

David Blatner and Anne-Marie Concepción, InDesign Gurus extraordinaire have invited me to do two EPUB related webinars for InDesign Secrets. The first, InDesign to EPUB with Liz Castro, on November 17 at 10am PT, will be a 75 minute survey course, explaining how to go from InDesign CS4 or CS5 to validated EPUB. I'll show you both how to go from an existing InDesign document originally created for print, as well as what you need to keep in mind in order to create InDesign documents that can be leveraged for both print and digital editions of your books.

Early Bird Tickets are available until Wednesday, November 10th (acks, that's the day after tomorrow!). You can get an extra 10% off just because you read my blog (or follow me on Twitter) by using the discount code GOURDS. (You gotta love David's sense of humor :)

On Wednesday, December 1, also at 10am Pacific (which is 1pm on the East Coast and 7pm here in Central Europe), I'll be doing the second EPUB Webinar: Advanced EPUB Formatting with Liz Castro. In that class, which also lasts 75 minutes, I'll show you how to crack open your EPUB document and add and adjust formatting by hand, including special fonts, keeping elements together, text wrapped around images, and much more.

You can take advantage of early bird pricing by buying your ticket to the second webinar by November 24. And don't forget to get your extra 10% discount by using the GOURDS code!

Ah, you say, that's not standing in front of a live audience! Well, I'm getting there :) For those of you on this side of the pond, I will be giving a talk (in Spanish) in Santiago de Compostela—which many say is the most beautiful city in Spain—on EPUB and how we got here on November 25th at the Trends & Creativity [GL] conference put on by the Clúster do Produto Gráfico e do Libro Galego [GL]. Many thanks to my Twitter friend Tati Mancebo for connecting me up with those folks.

Update: On Sunday, Apple fixed the confusing headline in their support article described below. It now correctly says “Update iPhoto '11 to 9.0.1 before upgrading library”. Much better!

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 Apple has just released an update for iPhoto '11, which they say “in extremely rare cases, could result in data loss when upgrading a library from an earlier version of iPhoto.”

I can't deny that the language really rankles. Frankly, I think they should be worrying more about their customers' photos that were lost and less about how it sounds. There should be a press release that alerts people to the problem and to the solution to make sure that no one else loses this very precious data.

And it doesn't help that they've done it in the most confusing way possible. The headline to the support article says “Upgrade iPhoto library prior to iPhoto '11 Update”:



But that's exactly what you should not do! Indeed, the whole rest of the article is about updating iPhoto '11 before upgrading your iPhoto Library, since upgrading your iPhoto Library with the originally shipped iPhoto '11 is what is erasing people's files.

This is made worse by the fact that they released an update called "9.0.1" for iPhoto "11". It turns out that iPhoto '11 is really version 9.0 (while the last version, iPhoto '09, was really version 8). It's confusing Marketing speak and right now it's pretty annoying. It makes you think that you should go back to iPhoto '09 and update it before installing iPhoto '11. That's not the case. To find out what version you have, choose iPhoto > About iPhoto.

The other problem is the confusion between “updating” the software (iPhoto itself) and “upgrading” your library of photos (the iPhoto Library package, of which there may be more than one, it may have some other name, and is usually found in your Pictures folder).

When you install iPhoto '11, it doesn't automatically or immediately touch your library. So, it's safe to install iPhoto '11 from the disks, then update it with Software Update or by manually downloading and installing the update. Your library will not yet be affected. You should definitely do this first, regardless of the headline of Apple's support article.

Once you open iPhoto '11, it will ask you if you want to upgrade your iPhoto Library. Here's where a lot of people (oh yeah, I forgot, extremely rare cases) had trouble. Make sure you have at least one and preferably two or more full backups of your library or libraries before proceeding. And make sure you've installed the update.

Apple says that updating your iPhoto Library can take “up to an hour or more” and that even if the program looks like it's hung, you should not force quit. Be patient. And contact AppleCare if you get stuck.

I just spoke to someone at Apple who called me all the way here in Barcelona to see if my data was OK and if I needed any help. I was pretty impressed. They know how important our photos are to all of us.

They confirmed that there was indeed a window during the updating process in which a force quit could “create data loss”. I asked if I would have had the same problem without force quitting and the answer was probably not, though they didn't really specify how long I would have had to wait. There are people on the Apple Discussion Forums who have let their updates go for days with no apparent signs of life. I asked if RAM could have been an issue, and they said no.

They asked me if I had any projects created with older versions of iPhoto, and I said I had two from iPhoto 5. And they asked me if I had any video playback extensions for QuickTime (I don't). They also asked how big my library was (233gb).

I asked if changing permissions of the iPhoto Library was really helpful (as someone suggested on one of my blog posts), and was told that it was only part of the solution. Deleting old projects does not seem to have any effect whatsoever.

Mostly, and this was the most important thing, they told me that a fix from Apple was imminent and that we would soon have official confirmation of same.

It's probably best to wait for the fix, but if you can't, be sure to properly BACK UP your iPhoto Library before upgrading to iPhoto 11!

I got more than 6000 visits to my website yesterday from folks worried about iPhoto ERASING their iPhoto Library, like it did to mine. People are listening. Which is good. But sounding such an alarm is an enormous responsibility that I don't take lightly. I am a very long-time Apple fan and iPhoto is one of my favorite programs.

But every time I think I might be being too harsh on Apple (maybe it was just me, maybe I really could have done something besides force quit when it hung and said it wasn't responding, maybe somehow my 233gb of photos really were shoehorned into 6.5gb etc. etc.), I go to the Apple Discussion Forums and read something like this:

"Well I am one of those who didn't have backup, so thousands of pictures and videos of my kids growing up is gone."

or this

I've lost all the photos of my new son, his Christening, my family over from Australia and my dad's 70th Birthday

and this last one is pretty awful:

iPhoto libraries are not backed up by Time Machine if iPhoto is running during the back up process. I leave my iPhoto application open constantly. I bought the best MacBook Pro money could by with 8GB of RAM so I could have multiple applications open for my design work.  This is an absolute horror show for me. 

and then I'm convinced I haven't yelled enough.

First and foremost, make a BACKUP before you upgrade your software.

And DON'T RELY on Time Machine. Although Apple says it works "in the background" without you having to do anything, it doesn't. I'm afraid I've been ranting about that for a while too. If iPhoto is open (and I leave iPhoto open all the time), Time Machine will skip your iPhoto Library, even as it backs up everything else.

You will think you have a backup, and you will be wrong.

Here are the steps:

1. Close iPhoto. (Again, Time Machine will not back up an open iPhoto Library.)
2. Run Time Machine, or other backup software.
3. Make a separate, additional, independent backup of your iPhoto Library onto an external hard drive, or other media, and store it off site (in some other building). Even if you can't figure out where to take it off site, don't let that stop you from making the second copy. Just drag the iPhoto Library to an external disk.
4. Look at your backups and make sure they have the same size as your original iPhoto Library. To do so, select the iPhoto Library and choose File > Get Info.

Only then should you attempt an upgrade to iPhoto 11.

What if you've already attempted an upgrade, and had your iPhoto Library disappear?

What worked for me was starting up my computer in Safe Mode (with the Shift key down), and then rebuilding Disk Permissions (use Disk Utility, it's in your Utilities folder in the App folder), and then I started up iPhoto with Command and Option pressed down. In the dialog box that appeared, I chose the options 1, 2, and 6. It then asked if I wanted to upgrade my library, and I said yes. And it worked. It took a couple of hours (my library is 233gb) but it worked. It's really slow for me, but so far, and I'm not convinced about the interface, but it looks like my photos are intact.

If that doesn't work, I've also heard of people

eliminating duplicate fonts from the Font Book
Remove DIVX codecs from Library/QuickTime or ~/Library/QuickTime
and even removing files from within the iPhoto Library package
using disk recovery software

Of course, you can also call Apple or post your particular circumstances on the Apple Discussion Forums. There is a wealth of information there.

Good luck. And keep spreading the word:

DO NOT upgrade to iPhoto 11 without a BACKUP!!!

I tried to upgrade to iPhoto 11 yesterday, only to find that my 233Gb of photos had been reduced to 6.5Gb, and that my 50,000 photos from the last ten years were gone. Completely. And I was not alone. Reading through the Apple Discussions Forum is heart-wrenching. Post after post from folks who have lost thousands and years of photos. I have done my level best to spread the word and make sure that people have a solid backup (as I thankfully did) before upgrading. If you follow me on Twitter, you're probably sick of me posting about it. But I love my own photos too much to not do everything I can so that no one else loses theirs.

And I guess I love iPhoto too much to give up on it. I thought a lot about whether I really wanted to try again. I even gave Picasa a cursory look as Farhad Manjoo recommends. In the end, I felt like all my public grousing at least demanded that I try again and see if I could find a solution. OK, and I admit it, I still wanted to see it for myself.

Thanks to the folks in the Apple Discussion Forums, I found a solution that worked for me. I restarted in Safe Mode (by holding down the Shift key as the computer starts up). Then I went to Disk Utility and repaired Disk Permissions. After copying my backup of my iPhoto Library back to my computer—which took more than two hours—I launched iPhoto with the Command and Option keys held down. In the alert that appeared, I chose options 1, 2, and 6. iPhoto then asked if I wanted to upgrade my library, to which I said yes.

And then I just waited. And waited. I even left to run an errand. Several hours later, it was done. And all the photos are there. I'll let you know if it was worth it.

But don't forget to make a BACKUP before you try it!

I was very excited to hear about iPhoto 11. I'm a longtime iPhoto user, with more than 50,000 photos in my iPhoto Library that lately has grown to 233Gb. The Full Screen feature looked great, and I'm dying to see the new books feature. I wrote an entire book on iPhoto book themes and can't wait to see what's new.

Until today. Upon upgrading to iPhoto 11, I got the revolving gray wheel for a very long time, and the Finder said that iPhoto had "stopped responding" so I force quit and started again. I was finally able to upgrade and rebuild my library, but there was nothing there. Every event was labeled properly, and contained placeholders for my images with my labels and even my ratings, but the images themselves were not there. They were all gone.



When I went to see how big my iPhoto Library was, it said 6.3Gb. There's no earthly way my 233Gb of photos could suddenly fit into 6.3Gb. Further confirmation is that suddenly there are 230 extra GB available on my hard drive.

I would be sick (and furious) except that I backed up my library twice before attempting the upgrade. Please pass this information on to everyone you know so that no-one else loses their photos.

Apple's Discussion Forums are full of other people experiencing the same issue. Make sure you have at least one backup before attempting to upgrade. Also, if you depend on Time Machine, make sure Time Machine has been able to complete a full backup with iPhoto completely closed. Note that Time Machine will not properly back up your photos if iPhoto is open.

It's absolutely unconscionable that Apple should release software that would erase an entire iPhoto Library. We must spread the word to minimize the damage. Thanks.

As soon as I figure out how to upgrade successfully, I'll post that information here.