Is my iPhoto library still lost?

April 18, 2024 2:58 AM

I am cleaning up my office, and found two LaCie harddiscs with back-ups from my old work computer. This is good. The first thing I thought is that now I can recover my old photos, not least 600 photos from Japan. But for some reason, I cannot import the pictures from the external disc.

My laptop does not support iPhotos, but my desktop is a cranky old machine that still runs on Yosemite 10.10.5, and it will happily create a new iPhoto library. But it will not accept the library from the external disc. What can I do?
I'm not smart enough to find this information on the internet.

posted by mumimor to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

I would probably go for a manual deep dive in this case. There's a way to do a series of upgrades on the Library to get it into a format that Photos can manage, and then there's a way to merge the results into your current Library, but honestly it's more of a pain and probably more prone to error.

First, make a back up of the iPhoto libraries. Old hard drives are finicky and it would be sad to start working on this and then have something fail partway through.

Right-click (or control-click) on the old iPhoto Library file in the Finder and choose "Show Package Contents"—the internal workings of the Library file are actually just a bunch of folders. Look inside the "Masters" folder and you should find (in a lot of nested folders) your original photos.

You can copy those to a folder on your Desktop or wherever, and then do whatever you like with them.
posted by bcwinters at 4:42 AM on April 18 [4 favorites]

Response by poster: Thanks! I worked perfectly, though it took a few hours (of waiting, not clicking and dragging).
posted by mumimor at 10:24 AM on April 18 [2 favorites]