iPhoto 08 - Restoring an album (not photo's!)

Hi,

I was re-ordering my albums in iPhoto '08 within folders and i somehow managed to lose an album. The original photos are still there it's just the album has gone.

As I understand it the albums are just 'playlists' of photos so I have effectively just lost a 'playlist'.

I tried to restore the album through TM but it tries to re-import the photos and obviously reports that there are duplicates. I don't need to re-import the actual images - I just want the album back.

Any ideas on best way to do this?

OK, now I'm confused.

I went and highlighted the album in TM and restored. I let it go ahead and import the duplicates - it created a brand new untitled event which just contained the photos from the deleted album. The original photos still existed in the original event.

I created a new album from this event and hey presto I had my album back.

Now, what to do with the new event? Keep it and I've got duplicate photos. Delete it and the newly 'restored' album is empty.

OK It's a pain but I can reconstruct my deleted album but what if I'd accidently deleted them all. That would be a lot of work lost.

Does this mean effectively Time Machine does not backup your albums?

When you first "lost" your album, you may have inadvertently just moved it to be a subalbum of another one. If you did in fact delete it, you could have just created a new album and started over. If Time Machine duplicated your event, then just delete the original event and you should be fine. Or delete the album and the event Time Machine created, and make a new album from the original event.

skybolt said:

When you first "lost" your album, you may have inadvertently just moved it to be a subalbum of another one. If you did in fact delete it, you could have just created a new album and started over. If Time Machine duplicated your event, then just delete the original event and you should be fine. Or delete the album and the event Time Machine created, and make a new album from the original event.

Click to expand...

Hi Mary,

Thanks for the reply. That was a good point - I could've just moved the album as I was dragging it around my library at the time. However I've gone through all my other albums and searched for it but it's not there.

As for making a new album afresh that is true but I created this album as a 'best of' album based on an existing event of 110 photo's. This existing event was of my newborn son and contained a lot of images that weren't great but I wouldn't want to delete. This 'best of' album had 52 photo's that took a little while to pick out.

I haven't lost any images just the time to it took to make that album. But I'm disappointed that Time Machine can't restore that album and I have to recreate it manually - I've lost faith in it. I'm unwilling to put a lot of work into creating albums that I can't backup.


Paul