I upgraded to iLife 05 (still using Panther). iPhoto 5.02 seemed to be quite happy but then my gorgeous 2 year-old girl switched off the external firewire drive the iPhoto library lives on and… So, on restart, every single one of the 16,000-odd photos in my library is gone – replaced by a neat, grey outline. All photos are intact on the hard drive and keywords, cropping and titles are all retained in iPhoto. Just no actual images. Holding down a complicated key combination to rebuild my library (which took 18 hours!) didn’t work. Still lots of neat, grey outlines (worse, since then iPhoto has crashed and, on force quit, returned with albums (hundreds of them) all gone. I am utterly stumped. Sort of dreading the prospect of rebuilding the whole thing from scratch… Oh God. Any ideas?
In which I try, after 25 years of blogging, to drop my ironic stance a bit.
I’m using iPhoto 4 on Tiger and came quite close to achieving this in Automator, but since this is just a GUI for AppleScript, couldn’t you open Script Editor, open up the iPhoto dictionary and knock something up that’ll pass a selection of folders from the Finder to iPhoto for import into the relevant album? I’m sure this is possible.
Is this any use? http://homepage.mac.com/butlers/iPhotoExtractor/rebuild.htm (I haven’t used it.)