right now, but thankfully I had a good night's sleep and was able to
get over my confusion and anger long enough to figure out what had
happened. It also helps that I know I have a backup of the photos
themselves.
Over the past couple weeks, I've been going through my iPhoto library
(the final resting place of all my photos once they've been processed
and backed up). While browsing my shots, I began to find pictures
that couldn't be found. I.e., I could see them in iPhoto, but trying
to open them beyond their thumbnails and ratings and other db stuff
would tell me screw you, cannot find it.
[In case you don't know, iPhoto is a program from Apple that acts like
a photo warehouse. It displays photos in small visuals until you
click them. It also allows you to describe the pictures, categorize
them, and organize them, as well as do some minor retouching.
Typically, my photos get copied to the directory iPhoto uses to find
the pictures, creating yet another copy of them in itself.]
I tried repairing the whole library and got scads of these missing
items. Scads. Then last night I discovered a brand-new missing photo
that I know I just barely put in there. Something wasn't right. So,
I realized it wasn't just older stuff since 2009, but also newer
stuff. No apparent pattern at all!! It couldn't be corruption of one
directory, etc, because it concerned pictures from all over the map.
After some research I came up with this:
http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?p=559846
This turns out to be exactly what my problem was: Somehow, a little
checkbox in the preferences on importing pictures into iPhoto was
clicked off along with the color profile embedding. User-style, of
course, I don't recall unchecking this or even knowing of its
existence, but it was unchecked. What this unchecking did was create
"shortcuts" to the pictures. Well, since I thought iPhoto was still
importing the pictures into itself, I've been freely moving my
directories at will. What confirmed this for me was finding some
website pictures go missing. In February, I began using iWeb for my
website design and moved all my sites' RapidWeaver folders off the
hard drive to an external one. The pictures that were in there had
been copied into iPhoto and I just noticed them to be missing. So I
tracked down the aliases and figured out where they had pointed to.
When I saw "rapidweaver" I knew exactly where those had gone to.
While I know I've lost /some/ photos, those don't matter because they
were off the 'net and not my own precious memories. I probably have a
time machine backup of them if I look hard enough. And, I have all
the missing filenames, so it's not difficult to restore things to
perfect balance and harmony. Everything is named by date so finding
them is super easy. The problem now is my hard drive space. That's
the original reason I moved crap off my hard drive in the first
place!! So, I'm looking into two things: 1, upgrade my hard drive to
a larger one and 2, using this helper program called iPhoto Buddy
(http://www.iphotobuddy.com/) to split up my library into smaller
pieces (by year, perhaps). The smaller pieces could be archived to a
couple externals for safekeeping, leaving me with more recent items to
enjoy. Eventually, I plan to pare down the library anyway (one reason
I was going through it). This would also make it easier on me to
revamp the hard drive a bit later because things would be more
manageable. (Currently, I'm not planning to clone the drive; I want
to start fresh with a new OS.)
Anywho, I need some time off work to futz with the hard drive piece,
but my backups can be brought in little by little in the interim. No
sweat.
Very relieved Mac user who was actually able to figure out what the problem was,
~w
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