October 2009

iPhoto Problem Solved

I have used iPhoto for years, since it was introduced by Apple for the Macintosh in 2002. At this time, I have 9914 items in the iPhoto library. A few of these are actually Quicktime movies from my new iPhone 3GS. Many have been imported directly from my Canon A85 digital camera. Others have been scanned in, saved directly into iPhoto from email messages or dragged in from any other window on the Mac, even from Windows XP.

Anyway, I have had a small problem with syncing iPhoto with my
AppleTV for a couple of years. I just exported any photos that I wanted to use elsewhere. I forgot about the problem until a few days ago when I purchased the new Bento 3 database program which has integration with iPhoto. When I first fired up Bento, it could not see the iPhoto library. I checked the Bento User Forum and found a similar problem discussion that got me started on a path to finally solving my problem. The problem revolved around the operation of the iLife Media Browser which shows up only as a menu item in iLife applications on the Mac.

After researching this further, I remembered that I had actually saved a link to an 
Apple User Forum which points to possible corruption in the iPhoto Library. A little more testing with techniques from the Apple Forum to see if I could fix the corruption, I finally decided to create a new library. The new library worked fine with Bento and I started exporting from the old and importing into the new. Since this proved to be a lot of work I decided to dig deeper to solve the corruption problem. 

I discovered an application named iPhoto Library Manager that identified the corruption in the AlbumData.xml file that is part of the iPhoto Library. That gave me the line number and text that was causing the problem. I then used TextWrangler to view the XML file and edit it, but iPhoto kept recreating the error. I examined the lines around the error and noted that it was part of an album definition. With the album identified, I went back into iPhoto. I selected all the photos in the problem album and created a new album from the selection. I deleted the old album and quit iPhoto. After checking the library with iPhoto Library Manager which gave no error, I went back into Bento which loaded the iPhoto library with no problems.

Now I can see my iPhoto Library within Bento, my AppleTV, my iPhone, the Mac desktop/screensaver, GarageBand and possibly a few other Mac applications.
 
Thursday, 01 October 2009 18:00