iPhoto "Places" lost its maps

[John Varela]

Everything was working yesterday but today there are no maps in iPhoto. The map area of the Manage My Places window is blank. The map in the Info for individual photos is blank. The data base for Places is at least partly there because the Manage My Places window still lists all the place names. There just are no maps. Similarly, the Info for an individual photo correctly names the photo's place, but there is no map.

It appears as if iPhoto stores pointers to a set of Google maps on some server somewhere and has lost the link to the maps. Google maps still works fine in Firefox.

Restoring the iPhoto library and the app from known good backups doesn't help.

Other facts: Running OS X 10.8.2 upgraded from 10.6.8 less than a month ago. iPhoto '11 (9.4.2). There are over 10,500 photos in the library and every one of them has a Place identified for it. I don't know how many different Places are in the Places data base but there are a lot of them. They can be counted if someone thinks that would be a useful number to know. I haven't added any new places recently so this isn't a matter of having just now overflowed a pointer or something.

Has anyone else seen this kind of problem? Any suggestions for what to do about it?

 

[DeltaMac]

If the maps load from some remote server, then it could be a temporary glitch
I'd say you could wait a day or two. The problem may fix itself.

You could check the Apple system status.
http://www.apple.com/support/systemstatus/
I don't know if that would be related to what you see ??

 

[John Varela]

One reason I posted here was that I figured if it was a server problem I would not be the only person experiencing it. Since in fact I am the only one experiencing it, I was forced to rethink and of course it was all my fault. A couple of weeks ago I bought the new version of Little Snitch and was suddenly inundated with requests from various apps to make external connections. iPhoto asked to connect to Flickr; I have a Flickr account that I don't use so I denied permission. Then iPhoto asked to connect to Google and, thinking that this was another of Google's evil tracking things, denied it. (Checking, I see that Ghostery is blocking two Google trackers on this very forum right now.) Then some time later I discovered that I wasn't getting maps in iPhoto. At last putting two and two together...

 

[DeltaMac]

Good thing you know how to add

Lots of users over-think with Little Snitch. Although it's a good tool, it's also simple to lock things down too tight, and then "weird" results happen. Amazingly enough, some apps _need_ to "phone home", or they may stop working. Glad you have it fixed...