Those links weren't active, you needed to copy/paste them into your Browsers URL bar, so that's why they appeared to not work. Don't worry with doing that as I checked out the 4 links and 2 were dud anyway ....
So never mind that earlier link I posted and let's see if we can bring back your valuable pics.
Here's some info about iPhoto and how it works with your images:
About The iPhoto Library Folder
iPhoto stores all of the photos and information about your library in an iPhoto library folder. When you import photos into iPhoto, they are copied by iPhoto into the library folder, and iPhoto takes care of organizing them within that folder and keeping track of where they are. iPhoto also creates a handful of its own data files in the library folder along with the photos themselves. These files contain information such as how you have your photos organized into albums, the title, ratings, keywords, and other information you assign to your photos, and much more. Note that in iPhoto 7, Apple has now changed the library folder so that it is a package, meaning that it no longer appears as a folder in the Finder. You can still delve into its contents, however, by control-clicking on it and selecting "Show Package Contents" from the contextual menu.
Typically, while working with iPhoto, it keeps all the details of this folder hidden from you. You can just use iPhoto's interface to manage your photos, and you never even need to look inside the iPhoto library folder itself. However, in some cases, especially if you encounter problems with your iPhoto library, in can be useful to know a little bit more about what goes on inside the library folder.
So your photo's are stored in YourUserAcct ~> Pictures ~> iPhoto Library and this is where we are going to recover them from.
Navigate to the Pictures folder and in the iPhoto Library, do you see a folder named 'Albums' ? If so, open the folder and have a poke around and if you see some/any of your pics then close the folder and highlight the folder by clicking on it, then press and hold the Option key as you drag that folder onto your Desktop. This should create a copy of the Albums folder on your Desktop and you will see a green + sign next to the mouse cursor as you drag the folder to your Desktop.
2006, 2005, 2004, etc.
When running iPhoto 5 or earlier, these folders are where iPhoto stores the actual photos that are in your library. The photos are organized in a hierarchy of subfolders based on their dates. For example, a photo dated February 24, 2004 would be found by looking in the "2004" folder (year), then the "02" folder (February, month #2), then the "24" folder (the day). Inside each "day" folder are the photos themselves, along with a folder named "Thumbs", which contains scaled down copies of the original photos. There may also be a folder named "Originals". If you edit a photo in iPhoto, it will make a copy of the original photo inside this folder before making any changes. That way, you can later revert to the original version within iPhoto if you want to discard the changes. You may also see files in these folders ending with ".attr" or ".roll". These files are created by iPhoto 2 and earlier only, and are unused by iPhoto 4 and later.
So, while in the iPhoto Library folder, have a look for folders with year numbers as the name of the folder and highlight them and press and hold the Option key as you did above, and drag the group of highlighted folders onto your Desktop.
Finally, copy the 'Originals' folder in the same manner as above, onto your Desktop. You could say that this folder is the most important of them all as it contains the 'raw' photos, as they were imported from your camera and before you performed any editing/cropping on them.
Hopefully, you now have all your photos on your Desktop and back in your control again.
I'd like you to try the following, please:
Hold down the
Option + Command (apple) keys while you launch iPhoto from the Dock.
You should see the following dialogue box:
There is a recommendation to backup your library first but we have just done that so we can continue. It wouldn't hurt to tick all the boxes here and then just click the
"Rebuild" button and let iPhoto try to repair itself.
Let me know how this goes ... it may be that iPhoto will be able to fix whatever problems that are plaguing it and return to normal or it may be that you need to start over from scratch.
I hope you have been able to follow this and successfully recover all your photos. Whether or not you decide to start again, creating a new library and continuing from there, is up to you. To create a new library just quit iPhoto if it's running, and hold the Option key as you lauch it from the Dock
(or your apps folder):
Click on the
'Create Library' button to have iPhoto open up a fresh Library window for you to import your photos into.
You now have a choice whether to import the contents of the "Originals" folder into iPhoto
(just drag the folder onto the Library window) but the result will be that all your photos will be imported at once and will require sorting again and the import date might not reflect the correct date that the photo/s were taken
(you may be able to change this later, within iPhoto) OR you can drag the folders that have the year as a folder title
(2003, 2004 etc), onto the iPhoto Library and these may be sorted out as they are imported
(I honestly am not sure as I am using iPhoto 7). These photos may also show any modification/cropping etc that you had previously done prior to your iPhoto problems
(once again, I'm not 100% sure).
You can also just drag these folders onto the left column of the iPhoto Library Window, one by one, and not only will the be added to the library, but they will appear in the left column as individual
'Albums', which might make it a little easier to deal with.
T
his is where I found my iPhoto information.
