I need help with iPhoto, or, The Case of the Missing Pictures

Factual Questions
1

Somehow, something has gone wrong with some of my photos in iPhoto, and I am stumped as to how to fix it.

I have an album of photos from a trip I took last year. The album is right there in iPhoto, and all the thumbnails look perfect. But when I double click on a photo to get the full size version, I just get a black screen. When I right click on the photo and choose “Show Original”, it opens Finder and shows me a jpeg file that is zero kb and is obviously not the original.

If I try to export the photos to my desktop, I get the following error message: “Unable to create /User/TheFifthYear/desktop/filename.jpg”

So where the heck have my photos gone, and how do I get them back?

2

The thumbnails are cached, so that’s why they’re showing up fine.

Can you do a Spotlight search on the filenames of the photos you need? Or when you say the Finder shows you a jpeg of zero KB and “obviously not the original,” do you mean it’s obviously not the original because it’s zero KB, or is it a completely different file?

3

Because it is zero kb. They have the right file names, but there’s no there there.

When I do a spotlight search on the file name, I get two hits: one is the wrong photo (but with the same filename, which is just img_0060), and the other is the zero kb jpg.

Additionally, if I navigate to the iPhoto library in Finder, choose “show package contents”, and then click through to that album, both in the “Originals” folder and the “Modified” folder, all the files for that album are zero kb.

4

Sorry, but you’re boned.
You have a recent backup, right?

5

Yeah, that’s my unfortunate diagnosis as well.

6

Bummer. While I do have recent backups going back a couple months, for reasons I don’t understand my older backups appear to be missing. My time capsule says my oldest back up is from August. I had a hard drive die about that time, had a new one installed, and restored from the Time Capsule. Unfortunately, I must have screwed something up because all my backups from before then are now gone. C’est la vie.

7

FWIW -
I consider my photos to be the most valuable data on my hard drive. I have at least 5 copies of them:

  1. On the drive itself.
  2. In my Time Machine backup
  3. In my archival backup in my fireproof filing cabinet.
  4. In my copy of the archival backup in my safe deposit box in the bank.
  5. In DVD backups of each SD card from the camera.