Later, with the FireWire drive connected again, he relaunched iPhoto and was surprised to find that while his "new" images showed up, his older library and albums were nowhere to be seen. He could see that they were still on the FireWire drive, but iPhoto didn't seem to know anything about them. He called me with two questions. First, out of curiosity, where were the new photos stored, as he couldn't find them using Sherlock or the Finder? Second, and much more important, how could he get the original library and albums to show up in iPhoto again?
Those of you who are familiar with the way OS X operates probably have already figured out what happened. For those of you who don't know what the problem was and would like to know, read the rest of the article for the cause of the problem and the relatively easy solution -- although I will admit I was stumped for a few minutes myself until doing a bit of sleuthing in the Terminal!
The problem my friend ran into is basically that the system did what it needed to do to get the job done. So when he connected his camera, iPhoto launched and checked its preferences for where to find the image library. In the prefs file, the location had been altered to point to the now-missing FireWire drive. For ease of example, let's assume that they were stored in a folder named images on a partition named Media on the FireWire drive. In this example, the prefs file for iPhoto (com.apple.iPhoto.plist in ~/Library/Preferences) would contain these lines:
<key>RootDirectory</key>When iPhoto goes to open this location, it finds that it doesn't exist (since the FireWire drive isn't mounted). So the system simply creates a new folder structure matching the specified path in /Volumes, and iPhoto launches as usual.
<string>/Volumes/Media/images/</string>
This answers question number one - where did the new imports go? They were all sitting in the newly created (but invisible from the normal Finder) /Volumes/Media/images folder structure. To see them, I had my friend use Go -> Go to Folder (command-tilde) in the Finder and enter /Volumes as the destination. This opens a window to the Volumes directory (which contains all mounted drive volumes). In that window, there were several volume icons (disks with globes on top of them) along with one lone folder icon for "Media", which then contained another folder for "images", which then contained his newly created iPhoto library.
To make sure we saved the 'new' images, I had him select all of them from within iPhoto and export them to the desktop. Once that was done, it was time to tackle problem number two - how to get iPhoto working normally again.
The reason that iPhoto continues to see the same "newly imported" images each time it is run is because that's where the Prefs file is telling it to look. Remounting the FireWire drive does not solve the problem because the FireWire drive will actually now mount with a new name. Since "Media" in the Volumes folder is now already used (by the newly created folders), when the FireWire drive comes online it is named "Media 1". This name does not match the iPhoto prefs, so nothing from the drive is displayed. You can see if you have this problem by simply looking at the Volumes folder in the Finder - there shouldn't be any folder icons, and you should not have a "1" after your drive names unless you put it there yourself.
To get the old library and albums back, it's a relatively straightforward process:
- Quit iPhoto if it's running (and make sure you have any images from the 'bad' location exported to a safe location).
- Unmount the FireWire drive if it's running by ejecting any mounted partitions and unplug it.
- In the Finder, use command-tilde and enter /Volumes to display the drives window.
- Drag the 'bad' folder ('Media' in our example) to the trash. Do not drag anything with the drive/globe icon to the trash, only drag out the item with a folder icon!
- Empty the trash if you're paranoid.
- Reconnect the FireWire drive.
- Relaunch the iPhoto application
Although this explanation is overly detailed, I tried to provide some explanation of not just how to fix the problem, but why it happened in the first place. The moral of the story? If you keep your iPhoto library on a removable drive, make sure the drive is mounted prior to launching iPhoto. Also keep a heads-up for other programs that may have hard-coded path preferences pointing to removable drives, as this could happen with other applications as well.

