Restore iPhoto keywords after reinstall

Apr 26, '02 09:05:20AM

Contributed by: acct_removed

Last weekend I reinstalled OS X from scratch on my iBook. I had a backup of my iPhoto Library, but when I opened the freshly installed iPhoto (with the old Library folder), I noticed that my old keywords were no longer there. iPhoto showed the standard set of keywords instead.

I had a copy of my old ~/Library/Preferences/ folder, and when I replaced the new com.apple.iPhoto.plist with the older copy and re-launched iPhoto, my keywords were back. At first I expected that all photos would have lost their associated keywords, but that wasn't the case; all keywords returned as soon as I replaced the .plist file.

So, if you want to backup an iPhoto Library to reinstall your OS, and you use your own keywords in iPhoto, make sure to save a copy of the com.apple.iPhoto.plist file in a safe place.

[Editor's note: In general, preference files in OS X tend to store a lot of very useful information, often well beyond what you might expect from the OS 9 versions. For example, the Finder's preference file also stores your Finder Toolbar settings. So even if you slack off on backing up your full system, you may very well wish to drag a copy of the whole ~/Library/Preferences folder to a safe place, just in case your prefs ever get corrupted. I can speak from experience that recreating a well crafted Finder Toolbar is not necessarily a fun task!]

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