Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Don't Upgrade to iPhoto 9.1.5

On Sunday afternoon I complied with my Mac's desire to run a software update. When I next launched iPhoto I found that all the nice coloured icons on the left hand menu are now grey which initially made me think they were not functioning, not so they are meant to be like that now. Worse than this however was that none of my photos displayed when in the "all events" view nor as thumbnails in the event itself. When I double clicked to open the image it deigned to show itself, but then promptly disappeared when I reverted to the thumbnails. 

I quit and relaunched the application, rebooted the computer and repeated for good measure but nothing worked. the application decided that it wanted to spend 3 hours detecting faces (a feature I do not use or want to use) so I left it to its devices to see if that would fix things. It did not. Eventually it did decide to provide me with thumbnail previews once in an individual event. However, it showed the same single image of Blaine in Paris as the thumbnail for every photo in the entire library.

It did not take long on Google to learn that 9.1.5 has been unkind to other mac users so I decided to roll back the update. This required several hours on Google and various forums to identify the best route, Apple support does not describe how to "un update". To employ a belt and braces approach I quit iPhoto, ran a time machine back up and made a FAT copy of the albums that I had added since Sunday. I opened applications in finder and then entered Time Machine, went back in time to Sunday morning (right clicking then get info to ensure it was iPhoto 9.1.3), another right click then restore to... navigate to the applications folder in the wizard and enter your administrator credentials when prompted.

Relaunching iPhoto I was delighted that the anticipated results has come to fruition, my library was unchanged but the application version was rolled back. My double back up was unnecessary, but you can be certain that had I not spent the time doing that then it would have all gone wrong. Oh important note, when you relaunch iPhoto be sure to check the skip 9.1.5 box or you will be doing this all again.

1 comment:

  1. Hi! I was googling around and it seems like we got the same problem. Maybe you can try to rebuild the iPhoto Library. You can reach this option by holding Option+Command and click the iPhoto icon. There you can rebuild all the database and the miniatures. Hope this could help you.

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