Sunday, October 24, 2010

WARNING!!! iPhoto 11 Erases ENTIRE iPhoto Libraries

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.

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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.

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