Looking for missing pictures.

[TiLepre]

I am not sure if I can do anything about this but I would like to see. I hope I will try to explain the best way I can.  I have an external disc that I used to duplicate my music and picture files. My old imac g3  crashed and I had to send it out for repair and they had to reinstall macos10. I was not worried about my pictures because I had a dupricate iphoto library in my external hard drive.  I bought a new imac with a duo processor and hooked up my external drive to transfer my pictures to iphoto. When opening up the library I noticed that some of the pictures were gone. I can see the files with the names of the missing pictures, but they are empty I tried to open it but there is an error message reading that there is not enough information to open the file. What I am confused about is why are some of the pictures fine? Is there a way of restoring the other pictures?

[z-mac]

In Finder, view the content of your external disk in List format, i.e. small icons with the date and other information showing. Scroll rightward until you see the size of the files. The files that you can't open probably have 0 or very few bytes compared to the size of the complete files.

You cannot recover these 0 byte files. They were not copied correctly to your back-up disk... or they never were complete files in the first place. OR, I suppose, you might have disconnected the external disk before the last back-up operation was complete.

[TiLepre]

Thank you for your response. The only thing that makes sense to me is that they probably were damaged through not disconnecting properly.  I am confused because they were fine before my computer crashed so I thought they were safe in the external disc. From now on I am putting all my pictures at a online site where I can access from any computer and I will also copy them to cd's.

[z-mac]

Be careful about which site you use for storing your images. Some sites don't provide a way for you to retrieve your images easily. (*Cough* Flickr *cough*.)

Backing up to an external hard disk is faster and more convenient than backing up to optical discs. It's worth it for you to try to understand what went wrong in the back-up we're discussing. What happened is regrettable but I think the chance of it happening is small if the procedure is sound.

[Dan Millar]

Colombo time - there's just one more thing....

Before you go flinging your private pictures onto the internet and abandoning iPhoto, let's revisit some of your issues. Were the files in fact 0 bytes? If that's the case - they never transferred properly in the first place. A bad disconnect will not selectively zero some files, it may wipe a contiguous area of files, but that's a pretty random process, unlikely it singled out your iphoto images.

You say that OSX was re-installed on your computer and that's when your trouble began. Did you update your OS and iLife after the re-install? Were there other files on your hard drive(external) that were also munged (techtalk for "all f#$%ed up")? If not, I have a feeling you may have just opened your library with a slightly older version of iPhoto than the last one that touched it...

May be too late, but just a thought....

Dan