Retrieving photos from Time Machine Back-up

I seem to have lost about three years photos but until about 6 months ago I was backing up to a WD Passport on Time Machine. I've tried to see if my lost photos were backed up at that stage but can't seem to access them. I've tried opening iPhoto whilst holding down the option key but get the following message:

The iPhoto library is a Time Machine backup, and so cannot be used as the main library. Reopen iPhoto with the Option key held down to choose another library.

Any ideas? Thanks.

Two ideas: Do It Properly, or Brute Force.

The Do It Properly plan means you need to use Time Machine as it was intended to be used, and not try to use its old library as your main library (as you've seen, that doesn't work). You open iPhoto, then invoke Time Machine from the menu bar, then search through the Time Machine archive until you find the albums or photos you've lost and restore them.

If you can't do it that way for some reason, then you have to use the Brute Force method. Going through the Finder, you dig into the Time Machine sparse image, find the backup of your iPhoto Library (it sounds like you have already gotten this far) and then COPY IT to another drive.

THEN you open iPhoto holding the option key and choose it as your library. That should work.

As for how to MERGE your recovered library with your current library, for THAT I would strongly recommend iPhoto Library Manager.

Chas, without wishing to sound like a switcher or a newbie (I'm neither), would your suggestions work with what appears to be two versions of I-Photo 09; one on my I-Mac hardrive, and the other on my external HD? For some reason, my EHD has a different, unmerged library of photos than my HD does, possibly with duplicates - but I'm talking about 26k photos on the Mac, and 63k on my EHD - not a few hundred!

I've not had time to sort it out yet, but the time is approaching where I will be able to (eg next week). Any advice would be hugely appreciated - I'm thinking that Iphoto Library Manager might help?

Thanks

Jean

iPhoto Library Manager could merge both of those libraries into one and ignore the duplicates (actually iPhoto itself is doing the ignoring of duplicates). You'll want to double-check with the developer of ILM to make sure they think the program can handle such large libraries, but my guess would be that it can.

Once you've gotten one fully-merged library with no or few duplicates, (and there's a great little $8 duplicate hunter for iPhoto that works great in case ILM doesn't catch them all) you can then use ILM to split that massive library however you like.