iPhoto Disaster

I wanted to take a moment to explain my current and upcoming sparse attendance to iNaturalist: Just before Noon today, July 26, our home suffered an extremely brief power outage (or surge?--I'm not sure) which caused my computer to restart. That always screws up iPhoto if I have it open at the time. During the 30+ min. that it was taking for iPhoto to check its library and database upon restart, we had another brief power glitch. That apparently corrupted the iPhoto library or database thoroughly. iPhoto still launches but cannot find my 150,000-image photo library. The iPhoto Library still appears in its proper place and size, but I have made no headway in getting either iPhoto or Photos to recognize it and open it.

Without going into all the remediation efforts I've made so far, suffice it to say, that I'm looking at the loss of anywhere from 25 to 75% of my images (depending on what kind of back-up I can access). I'm devoting full time to resolving this issue with every resource available to me. It will take some time. As a result, I will not be spending as much time on iNaturalist in the near future as I normally do (several hours per day). I will check in occasionally, but until/unless I fix the current problem, I will not be uploading anything new for awhile.

CWS

Publicado el julio 27, 2020 03:03 MAÑANA por gcwarbler gcwarbler

Comentarios

OMG. What a nightmare. I'm so sorry to hear that this happened. I can't image your loss., but its also a huge loss to iNaturalist and to Texas natural history at all levels. I hope that someone is able to recover the images.

Publicado por ptexis hace más de 3 años

If I can't recover any of the photos, the primary loss to iNaturalist will be those images which I had not uploaded yet. That would include some portion of the recent Panhandle BioBlitz (plants from 6/1 and other images from 6/2-6/3) plus anything I hadn't uploaded from the rest of June and a modest backlog of images from previous years.
I'm still working on the issue, however. Several tricks yet to try.

Publicado por gcwarbler hace más de 3 años

That's awful, Chuck. I know what it feels like. I will offer what may be a bit hopeful news. Most likely you have not lost any of your original photos. I expect they will still be available in the folder under "Pictures > iPhoto Library.photolibrary > Masters" organized in sub-folders by year, month, day, and time. But if the iPhoto Library is corrupted and cannot be recovered, what you will have lost is all the metadata you added to the photos via iPhoto. And I know you spend a lot of time adding genus, species, and other tags. So it will indeed be a big loss. But hopefully not a loss of the photos themselves.

Publicado por billdodd hace más de 3 años

Chuck, so sorry to learn of your iPhoto problem. I think Bill's comment is correct, that you still have the originals; but metadata may be gone. You won't know without some digging.

I will note that IF you have a recent backup, you may need to work from that and re-do anything since that backup. FYI, my home photo workstation is a 2012 MacPro with 4 internal hard drives: drive 1, a 512 GB SSD, has all the operating system software, etc. drive 2, a 1 TB hard drive, is a backup of #1. Drive 3 (2TB) is my Lightroom Library and catalog, and has nothing but 50,000+ photos, sidecar files, DNGs; in short ALL my digital photos since 2000. Drive 4 (2TB) is a backup of drive 3.

Whenever I finish working on images and quit Lightroom (6.0), I launch SuperDuper and backup drive 3 to drive 4. And once a month, I bring in external drives stored in our workshop and back up to them. That way, in case of a house fire, I still have a reasonably recent backup in the workshop.

Greg has a similar backup system for his photo library. I'd be happy to help you in any way if I can, just LMK. (I became very anal about backups while photo editor/computer guy for TX HWYS. I was responsible for a nightly backup of the entire editorial system; and carried the previous day's backup home with me every day just in case of catastrophe in the office. Luckily, the only computer that failed was one that got fried by a surge; and the backup restored its contents just fine. (And yes, you should have a good surge protector at least, even better a battery-powered surge box, or UPS.)

Best wishes in getting your files restored.

Publicado por mikmurphy hace más de 3 años

Best of luck in recovering your images

Publicado por pedernaturalist hace más de 3 años

UPDATE: Thanks to all who commented and offered sympathy. As of 9 a.m., July 28, using a combination of a Time Machine b/u, a separate external hard drive, and peaking into and scavenging parts of the old corrupted iPhoto Library, I think I have restored essentially all of my photos. (I lost all edits I made to photos since my last Time Machine b/u which was about 3 weeks ago.)
I'm still working through a final few steps, but I breathed a big sigh of relief early this morning when it looked like I was successful.

Chuck

Publicado por gcwarbler hace más de 3 años

Yay!

Publicado por billdodd hace más de 3 años

Congratulations on that.

Publicado por ptexis hace más de 3 años

Oh man... I'm sure this was intensely frustrating... Glad that you were able to recover all of your photos, but hopefully you didn't lose too much energy on the frustration.

Publicado por sambiology hace más de 3 años

It was definitely a challenge to keep my cool and focus my attention on the problem at hand, minute step-by-step, and not let the panic set in. All things considered, right now in our world, this was a very minor "disaster"; I think keeping that in perspective helped me muddle through!

Publicado por gcwarbler hace más de 3 años

Glad to hear you had a recent backup. Hope it does the trick.

Publicado por rymcdaniel hace más de 3 años

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