iPhoto - restoring / rebuilding library from recovered data after HD fail

Grant

Grant

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I have had a WD ext drive fail.
I have managed to recover data including the photographs on it.

iPhoto is installed on a MBP, running mountain lion.
The photographs were kept on the ext drive with iPhoto accessing the pics on the ext drive.
During the recovery process it would appear all the photographs have been recovered, but the data recovered has been grouped into folders according to various file types - not the folders as they appeared within iPhoto.

For example, the iPhoto library may have contained various folders named "Johannesburg" or "Cape Town" for example - these folders would have contained photos of different file types.
The recovered data has been grouped into numerous folders according to file type ie "MP3", "AVI", "JPEG", "GIF" etc.
Amongst data recovered were various .plist files etc as appears in the attached image.
In total I am dealing with about 25 000 photos of different file types.

Is there any way of restoring iPhoto & its libraries to it's original state ?
iPhoto.jpg
 
Why not take this as an opportunity to move to aperture. While your library isn't particularly large it's still large enough. There are a number of advantages - including the Vault to back up your library - but the biggest for me was the space I saved. Aperture doesn't create a new version when you edit a photo like iPhoto does.
 
bwana said:
Why not take this as an opportunity to move to aperture. While your library isn't particularly large it's still large enough. There are a number of advantages - including the Vault to back up your library - but the biggest for me was the space I saved. Aperture doesn't create a new version when you edit a photo like iPhoto does.
Click to expand...


Listen to this man... He knows what he's talking about.
 
25k photos :whistle: Rather you than me!

Hopefully you will find something on the great wide web - must have happened to a photographer somewhere in the world before, who blogged about the road to recovery...

With this being said - if you reach the point where you have to manually resort files into specific subfolders, to try and reclaim things - and you're prepared to lay down a bit more cash, and spend a bit of time getting to know how it works - I can recommend Hazel.

http://www.noodlesoft.com/hazel.php

Click on What's New in Hazel 3 - and you will also notice a rule to assist in importing files into Aperture, from iPhoto... ;)

[It's quite ridiculous what you can have it do... For those who might be interested - check out some of these user scenarios: http://www.noodlesoft.com/buzz.php]

Good luck!
 
Normally holding down Alt as you click on iPhoto should bring up the Rebuild Database option.
 
Use the finder to search the folder and sort by date taken or created or something that will put them into a degree of rational order and hopefully you will be able to use that to extract the files into some semblance of order. But 25k of files and only one backup, a mistake to only learn once, I feel your pain!!

Aperture definitely the way forward once you have a plan, aperture will also give you options to automatically file the pics into folders as per the shoot date etc so ideally you could import the whole mess into Aperture and it will automatically sort it all out.
To a degree obviously but there are a myriad of different rules you can specify when importing that will help you.

Adobe Lightroom is also a very good option that can do a similar job and its not to expensive these days, you could even download a trial and just use it to organize all the pics back into the correct folder grouping once off.
 
Let us know how it works out!
It's going to be a big job but trust me people have messed up way larger libraries.
You gonna have to put some hrs in though :/
 
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