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Notawiz

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 7, 2008
24
1
Finland
Could somebody please shed some light on these matters...

About 3-4 years ago my photos went berzerk. I'm not exactly sure, when it happened, but in any case I didn't have any appropriate hard drive backup with which I could have fixed this problem. I mean I had some, but they didn't help in any way. Now they are gone, so no help there.

By "berzerk" I mean that when browsing and watching my photos in iPhoto and later on in Photos app, I got things like this:
- Many of the images were highly pixelated. We're talking about, I would guess, an average resolution of 300x200 instead of the original 4000x2500 or thereabout.
- Many of the images were rotated randomly.
- Many of the images were distorted in some form or fashion.
- Many of the images would seem about normal in the browsing window, but when I selected them and took a closer look, I might see nothing at all, or perhaps half the image - or perhaps three different images blended together.

Some photos were fine, but some - and we're talking about a few thousand here - totally chaotic. I couldn't find any kind of pattern to which photos were corrupted, and in which way they were corrupted.

Of course I tried to reorganize the archive with the tools provided by iPhoto and Photos. After every update and version, I crossed my fingers and clicked "Consolidate" or what ever the hell the function is called (I use the Finnish version of OSX). Every time the same thing: nothing changed.

YET ---

When I clicked or click the Photos Archive file in Finder, and then "Show the contents", they were and still are all there. All of my photos, just the way they are supposed to be. Intact, no random rotation or distortion, nothing out of the ordinary.

I have about 35 000 images. I have copied all the photos from the archive to a backup folder on an external hard drive, and some day I'm going to delete everything in Photos and then import it all from the external drive. This seems a bit stupid, since the only thing I'm doing is deleting the images and bringing the same images back again - but I've done some tests and it seems to work.

Since the whole archive is currently almost 400 gigabytes, the procedure will take a while. If anyone can give me a faster - and perhaps safer - way to do this, I would appreciate it. :)

AND ---

Another thing. When I search any of the images by name in Finder inside that backup folder on my external drive, I always get two files. Now let me be very clear: there is only one of each, no copies. But Finder finds two. Every time. Both files are in the exact same location, in the exact same folder on the same external hard drive. The only difference with the files is the date. There are always two files, with different dates - but let me be very clear again: there is only one file, when I look at the contents in Finder inside that folder. Yet the search function finds two, with different dates.

This is more of a conundrum, not a problem. But it would be cool to understand, WHY Finder does this. This phenomenon only applies to the image files in this backup folder on my external drive - all the other files on other drives work normally, as far as I can tell.

Thanks in advance!
 

robgendreau

macrumors 68040
Jul 13, 2008
3,471
339
Not sure, but the duplicate might have to do with the Finder finding hard links, which were used when converting from iPhotos to Photos I think. Might check.

And I dunno, but I think I'd switch to something that is less likely to make a mess of your photo organization. Photos is fine...when it works. When it doesn't, a managed Photos library is a mess to deal with. If you had used Lightroom for example, or Photo Mechanic, or something else that could write metadata to the image files you wouldn't have such a predicament.
 
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