My photos disabled my mom's iPhoto permanently!

[sepdet]

Help!

My computer: Ibook G4 running 10.4.3 with iPhoto 5.0.4
Mom's computer: Tower G4 running 10.3.9 with iPhoto 2.0

What happened:
1. In iPhoto 5, I selected photos in an album, chose "Burn disk" from "share" menu
2. Inserted disk in Mom's G4. Her iPhoto began to bounce on dock. Error message hidden behind other windows so she forced it to quit.

3. Checked my disk, discovered it wasn't just jpgs, but an iPhoto 5 library.
4. Restarted Mom's iPhoto 2. BUT-- *** it tried to load her own iPhoto library and announced her library belonged to a later version of iPhoto and wasn't compatible with hers, giving "quit" as the only option. ***

5. Tried loading her iPhoto library across the network onto her laptop, which has the same exact iPhoto 2. That worked just fine, no error messages about incompatibility. So her library was NOT actually somehow converted into a 5 format.

6. Tried searching for all recently-modified files on her original computer. Turned up brand-new plists in her iPhoto library folder. We threw those out, tried again. Iphoto then started from scratch, asked if we'd like to find an existing library to use or create a new iPhoto library. AS SOON AS IT CREATED A NEW LIBRARY, IT ANNOUNCED THAT LIBRARY WAS INCOMPATIBLE since it was a later version.

7. We deleted her iPhoto 2 on the tower and replaced it with the iPhoto 2 from her laptop, which was able to access her photos just fine on the laptop.

No matter what we do, her tower's iPhoto 2 continues to say that its iPhoto 2 files are unreadable because they belong to a later version-- EVEN if we create a brand-new library instead of using the old one. In effect, it's disabled itself to force her to buy an upgrade. But she can't upgrade without making her photo collection incompatible with all her other computers.

Please save me from hot water. I had no idea just sticking an iPhoto 5 library NEAR an older version of iPhoto would make it permanently inoperable.

 

[mosx86]

Help!

My computer: Ibook G4 running 10.4.3 with iPhoto 5.0.4
Mom's computer: Tower G4 running 10.3.9 with iPhoto 2.0

What happened:
1. In iPhoto 5, I selected photos in an album, chose "Burn disk" from "share" menu
2. Inserted disk in Mom's G4. Her iPhoto began to bounce on dock. Error message hidden behind other windows so she forced it to quit.

3. Checked my disk, discovered it wasn't just jpgs, but an iPhoto 5 library.
4. Restarted Mom's iPhoto 2. BUT-- *** it tried to load her own iPhoto library and announced her library belonged to a later version of iPhoto and wasn't compatible with hers, giving "quit" as the only option. ***

5. Tried loading her iPhoto library across the network onto her laptop, which has the same exact iPhoto 2. That worked just fine, no error messages about incompatibility. So her library was NOT actually somehow converted into a 5 format.

6. Tried searching for all recently-modified files on her original computer. Turned up brand-new plists in her iPhoto library folder. We threw those out, tried again. Iphoto then started from scratch, asked if we'd like to find an existing library to use or create a new iPhoto library. AS SOON AS IT CREATED A NEW LIBRARY, IT ANNOUNCED THAT LIBRARY WAS INCOMPATIBLE since it was a later version.

7. We deleted her iPhoto 2 on the tower and replaced it with the iPhoto 2 from her laptop, which was able to access her photos just fine on the laptop.

No matter what we do, her tower's iPhoto 2 continues to say that its iPhoto 2 files are unreadable because they belong to a later version-- EVEN if we create a brand-new library instead of using the old one. In effect, it's disabled itself to force her to buy an upgrade. But she can't upgrade without making her photo collection incompatible with all her other computers.

Please save me from hot water. I had no idea just sticking an iPhoto 5 library NEAR an older version of iPhoto would make it permanently inoperable.

Just how large is her photo collection?

I'd make a duplicate of the Photo library before messing with it any more (lost my grandma's email once, I always make duplicates since then ).

You've deleted the preferences for iPhoto, but have you tried removing its cached files?

~/Library/Caches/iPhoto/

If anything, you should be able to import the actual files if you can't restore the library.

 

[sepdet]

Hmmmmm. Maybe that's it! We'd searched for every single file on the computer with "iphoto" in the name, but I bet those cache files don't have it, do they?

However, the weirdness continues.... once again the "do Macs get viruses?" question rears its ugly head. I have trouble believing it, but I haven't really understood the guts of Apple OS since the Apple icon went monochrome.

Email from Mom:
I am really wondering what has been happening on this computer. Is it possible that I actually got a virus from somewhere, and it happened to manifest when we tried looking at your pictures? Another possibility is that there was some automatic update that was acting strange.

Besides the iPhoto attack, suddenly my mail stopped embedding pictures. Previously, i could attach them to a letter, and B---- would see the picture when he opened it. But without any changes on my part, the mail suddenly started only having the pictures as attached files. BW was able to open the last set, but i was also trying to send screen shots of some program bugs to a fellow we're working with, and he couldn't open the attachments at all.

Finally, the mouse went insane. I couldn't get it to rise above the dock. If I moved it higher, it would just fall down. i restarted, and then I could shoot the mouse up high on the screen, only to have it drop like a brick to the bottom.

Finally, I actually turned off the computer, let it cool down while I prayed and cold-started it. The mouse worked, I gave thanks, and went on working. Now I'm taking a break, so I decided to just see what would happen with iPhoto. It opened normally! So i will cross my fingers that whatever bad medicine was in there is now expired.