While messing around with my documents folder, I accidentally moved my Iphoto library somewhere. The next time I started up Iphoto, I couldn’t find it and so I started a new library. Then I found the old library. Now I have two different libraries and I can’t seem to figure out how to access the photos in the old library or combining the two. Any suggestions?
If you have Leopard, I think you can use Time Machine. If not, do a search for one of your photos that used to be in the library in your finder. When it shows up, click it, and along the bottom of the Finder window, it’ll show the path, maybe your others are all there!
I might be off base on this, but I don’t think that’s how Iphoto’s library works. It doesn’t create external photo files, it puts everything in the one “library” file.
There is one large XML file with a bunch of metadata about the photos but all the individual jpeg files are there all organized into neat little directories by date. If you’ve used iPhoto to edit your photos, the originals will be in a separate folder. The only way I can think of of getting them back into one library is to drag (import) the jpegs from the old directory into iPhoto. This isn’t going to preserve any albums or tags from the old iPhoto though.
A better solution might be to take this opportunity to archive the older files unto a DVD. **Start iPhoto with the option key held down to open the older library **and then burn them to a DVD. Then you can go back to the newer library and if you need to locate an image from the old library just pop in the DVD.