Hi folks, first time poster.
There is an older couple whom I help from time to time with their Mac issues. The latest thing they asked me to do was fix a horrible cycle of duplication in iPhoto. They apparently were trying to make backups of photos but somehow kept reimporting photos over and over again until they created a huge beast of an iPhoto library. They now have over 200,000 images in their iPhoto library. As you can imagine, this makes iPhoto nearly unresponsive. It takes 5+ minutes after you launch to be able to do anything besides watch the spinning colored disc.
My solution was to have them purchase Aperture which I would then use to import the iPhoto library but make sure that “Do not import duplicates” was selected. My hope was that that would eliminate all the duplicates (I think they have somewhere along the order of 5 or 6 dups of each image).
After download Aperture from the App Store (3.2.1) I then went to FIle > Import > iPhoto Library and Aperture located the library file just fine. When I click “Import” nothing happens. I noticed that the iPhoto library was showing as size “–” which troubled me. I was hoping it was just not sure how large it was and not that the library really was empty. I then went to File > Import > Show iPhoto Browser which loads up with no pictures in it.
I'm certain there are photos in the iPhoto library because if you let it churn long enough it'll tell you it has 200,000+ images. You can also see some images in iPhoto but it really is so bogged down it isn't usable.
I've concluded that either there is something wrong with the iPhoto library, or that perhaps there is more than one iPhoto library and the one Aperture is finding first is not the one with all their photos. If anyone has any experience with this sort of issue, or has suggestions for things I could try, I would really appreciate it. I hate the fact that I had this older couple spend $80 on Aperture and still not be able to get to their images.
Chris,
A few things come to mind.
First, is iPhoto the latest version? It’s possible that the latest Aperture isn’t reading an older version of the iPhoto library.
Next, the “do not import duplicates” features doesn’t work if files aren’t named the same. It’s a sad limitation to the feature, but you will run into it immediately if you import files off a card (or iPhone, for example) and rename files on import. On the next import, all your already-imported files do NOT show up as dupes, so will get imported again. Oops. It’s always been this way unfortunately. Therefore, if your assessment is correct that the reason their library got so bloated is because of importing backups, I fear that they may have imported files with name versioning, i.e. File_001 and then File_001-01 or -backup or something else, and so your idea may not work.
Finally, there’s a third party solution for getting rid of duplicates in iPhoto (and an Aperture version, too) called Duplicate Annihilator. I haven’t used it personally but I’ve heard good things about it.
Good luck, and please do keep us posted
-Joseph @ApertureExpert
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