02-26-2005, 06:17 PM

Hey I need some help and can't find much on this online, doesn't seem like iphoto allows for easy backups. I have a 12" powerbook with 2gb of photos in iPhoto 5.0. That also includes movie clips from my camera that are in the albums. I want to back everything up then copy it to my PC to burn to DVD. I can't find anything on this so what I did is I went through each album one at a time, and chose export and export using album name. That gave me thousands of pics that kept the album. I put them on ipod transfered to PC and burned, no problem. If I lose my iPhoto ever at least the file names keep the album. Only problem is none of my movies from the camera exported, looks like you can't do that! Do I really have to do that manually and figure out which albums have movies and which don't? There's so many. Is there not a program that will backup iPhoto or something easier? I don't care if I can access the backup from windows or what not. Even if its just one file that I can then hit restore and have it go back into iPhoto. It's such a pain, I don't even know if I want to keep using iPhoto after this, any suggestions?? :S

03-01-2005, 10:20 AM

You can look on either Version Tracker or Mac Update, one of these site might have something.

03-01-2005, 12:04 PM

I use the application syncup to do backups.

Find it here at versiontracker:
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/23679

You basically tell it what folder to backup (in your case either your entire images folder or the iPhoto library itself) and it will back it up to any drive you want.

You can then take that folder and burn it...

To restore data, just choose the same sync and hit restore... you'd have to copy the folder off the cd/dvd back onto the drive you synced to first, but this solution might work for you.

03-01-2005, 04:07 PM

Hi thanks for your help. The only problem with backing up the iPhoto library is when you copy it back, iPhoto has lost all the album information aparantly, so you're stuck with a bunch of weird folders with pictures out of order..

03-02-2005, 01:17 AM

Originally Posted by leemoreau

Hi thanks for your help. The only problem with backing up the iPhoto library is when you copy it back, iPhoto has lost all the album information aparantly, so you're stuck with a bunch of weird folders with pictures out of order..

Are you sure you're also copying the albumdata.xml file? I believe iPhoto maintains a database of your photos in there, so theoretically as long as you back up the entire folder it should work... Needless to say I haven't actually tried this, but it should work.

I say it should work because iPhoto Buddy (a little utility that lets you select a different library folder than the current one) will open my backup of my library folder with iPhoto without any problems...

03-02-2005, 12:29 PM

Hmm weird maybe I should try it, just that some sites online when I searched for how to back up iphoto most people were saying simply copying the iphoto library loses all album data or something.

03-03-2005, 04:49 AM

Let us know how you get on..

But I think if you copy the entire library file (along with the album information files in there) it should work...