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iPhoto 2.0 warning about Erase Camera Contents Apps
If you have the "Erase camera contents after transfer" option checked when importing photos from a camera and all photos are not imported because your hard disk is full, all your photos will still be erased from your camera. I just lost about 100 photos this way. I'm a bit disappointed that the Apple programmers did not do error checking on this feature.

I have no idea about whether this problem still exists. I was using iPhoto 2.0 with MacOS X 10.2.8 Since photos once taken are irreplacable, it might be best never to use the "Erase Camera Contents..." option.

[robg adds: I've always been quite paranoid about digital pictures, and have never trusted the "erase from camera" option in any of the image loading programs I've used -- I always delete them myself from the camera via its menus after I'm 100% sure the images are safely on my (two, actually) hard drives.]
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iPhoto 2.0 warning about Erase Camera Contents | 25 comments | Create New Account
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iPhoto 2.0 warning about Erase Camera Contents
Authored by: erikzred on Jan 16, '04 10:45:57AM

I would need to doublecheck this, but my experience has been that iPhoto has only deleted the pictures that have been transferred. Although I haven't run into the "out of disk" problem, I have had other reasons for the transfer to stop in the middle and I was impressed that it only had deleted the photos that had been successfully transferred.



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iPhoto 2.0 warning about Erase Camera Contents
Authored by: turbogeek on Jan 16, '04 11:04:12AM

This problem also exists in the 1.x release of iPhoto. It seemed to occur for me when I had a mix of video clips and photos. Beware!



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iPhoto 2.0 warning about Erase Camera Contents
Authored by: latenightmac on Jan 16, '04 11:06:48AM
Well I had the same problem over christmas! SO down load this file: Exif untrasher I got all my photos back from a CF card on the old Nikon digital camera I was using - best of all its a free programe! Hope this does the trick - Andy

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iPhoto 2.0 warning about Erase Camera Contents
Authored by: jimmern on Jan 16, '04 12:21:05PM

I have also once experienced that iPhoto failed to import because of a full HD, but still erased the card in my camera. I lost about 40 images. Didn't think to try and find them on the erased card at the time, so thanks for that hint! I now never use the ERASE FROM CAMERA option.



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iPhoto 2.0 warning about Erase Camera Contents
Authored by: Potemkin on Jan 19, '04 04:28:27PM

This utility will recover your images as long as you have not overwritten the card with new ones. "Erasing" the card doesn't delete the data.
You can find it at http://www.datarescue.com



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Use Exif Untrasher to undelete photos
Authored by: scotty321 on Jan 16, '04 11:05:35AM

Not sure if iPhoto would actually be this destructive or not (I've had great success with it NOT deleting any of my photos unless everything comes over to the computer successfully).

HOWEVER... there's a great program called Exif Untrasher that will help you "unerase" photos from your digital camera. I just tried it out on my digital camera that had all of its photos deleted, and it recovered 409 photos. Absolutely amazing.

Details here:
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/19622



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iPhoto 2.0 warning about Erase Camera Contents
Authored by: kenandles on Jan 16, '04 11:20:19AM

Photorescue Wizard worked right from my card reader it got back pictures that had been erased



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iPhoto 2.0 warning about Erase Camera Contents
Authored by: erikzred on Jan 16, '04 11:45:05AM

I just tried to duplicate the problem by setting up a disk image with not enough space for a batch of test photos I just took. Setup iPhoto to have it's library on this disk image and proceeded to import the files with the delete after transfer option. It imported about 6 of the 33 images and ran out of space. It came up with an error that it could not create a file and stopped importing. The 6 files that it was successful at importing were still on the card. I'm not saying that this person didn't have this problem -- just that it's not necessarily the problem he thinks it is. It is, however, probably a good idea not to use this option unless you have copied the files off the card to another location first -- much like Rob suggested in his comment with this post.



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iPhoto 2.0 warning about Erase Camera Contents
Authored by: jcteo on Jan 16, '04 12:15:37PM

I had the exact same experience!

I've even posted a write-up on my website. Here's another tip: NEVER let your boot volume fill up! Lots of weird things can happen! I lost my Mail.app configurations among other things. By the way, does anyone know of a disk space monitor that lives either in the Menu Bar or the Dock? Ideally something small and unobstrusive, just a Green/Yellow/Red status indicator.



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iPhoto 2.0 warning about Erase Camera Contents
Authored by: diamondsw on Jan 16, '04 01:31:24PM

I think that is the real problem - any operating system will start having problems when disk space on the boot drive runs out. Thin about it:

1) You run out of swap space
2) Most programs perform a "safe replace" when saving over a file. Write a new file, delete the old one, rename the new file. Running out of disk space will break this on a lot of programs.
3) Preferences will frequently be lost
4) Flat-out directory corruption is *likely* to occur

So go ahead and use "Erase camera contents", but by all means keep some free space on your drive!



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iPhoto 2.0 warning about Erase Camera Contents
Authored by: haumann on Jan 16, '04 03:03:23PM

Panther's own Activity Monitor is an application that lets you monitor disk usage, but I'm not sure it's one of the options you can leave in the dock.



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iPhoto 2.0 warning about Erase Camera Contents
Authored by: danbolling on Jan 19, '04 08:59:07PM
Check out this past pick of the week:
MenuMeters - a system monitoring tool
and the associated comments are helpful too.

---
Dan Bolling
danb4@bollingfamily.com

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Capture Has Same Bug?
Authored by: schneb on Jan 16, '04 01:18:00PM

I do not use iPhoto to import my photos, I use the Capture utility. (I do not like the proprietary format iPhoto makes my picture files) I wonder, does Capture have the same problem as iPhoto 2? I wonder if iLife '04 fixed this? Since it comes out today, perhaps we can test this.



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Capture Has Same Bug?
Authored by: diamondsw on Jan 16, '04 01:33:12PM

iPhoto doesn't use a proprietary format, just a funky folder structure based on date, roll number, etc. All of the pictures are sitting there in the format your camera stored them in (JPEG, RAW, etc). The whole "proprietary format" thing si just wrong.



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DD is your friend
Authored by: mschiller on Jan 16, '04 01:25:43PM

Most Camera's use the FAT or FAT32 filesystem on the CF card. The interesting thing about both of those is that deleting a file, does not destroy the data. Indeed all it really does is changes the directory information:

say mypict.jpg turns into $ypict.jpg
($ represents an illegal character, I can't remember off hand which one is used). The point is that all files with that character as the first character of the Filename are not shown in a directory and their actual data storage area is not reserved. Typically the Data is still on the disk and either some creative hacking with a hexeditor or a Fat File system undelete utility will solve your woes. But since that physical space on the disk is not reserved, it's critical that you do this ASAP after realizing you accidentally deleted something you wanted!

If this happened to me, and I really cared about the pictures I lost, I'd immediately do this in the terminal:

mount
(find the device info for your CF reader)
umount /dev/whatever
dd if=/dev/whatever of=$HOME/mybad.img bs=512

(of course first I'd have to clear out enough space on the powerbook harddrive!!! Because that dd command is going to create an byte for byte image of the CF card)


Once created I could then continue to use the CF card on vacation. When I had access to recovery tools (I know tools exist on Linux, old MSDOS, I'm sure something is out there that is free for MacOSX too) The image file can be loop back mounted and the recovery tools ran to look at the FAT directory structure find the deleted files and recover them.. Or if you need to move it to a DOS machine for example, you could write it back to the CF card with the following command scheme:
mount (get device name)
umount /dev/whatever
dd if=$HOME/mybad.img of=/dev/whatever bs=512


-- Matthew



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DD is your friend
Authored by: diamondsw on Jan 16, '04 01:48:49PM

Well, unless you use "Secure Delete" or somesuch, the file data is left behind on any filesystem, including HFS+. The directory information is removed (so you lose access to the file) and space is marked as free, but the data itself is not touched.



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iPhoto 2.0 warning about Erase Camera Contents
Authored by: ptwithy on Jan 16, '04 03:41:01PM

iPhoto 2 did this to me just recently, not due to disk full, but because it hung in some other fashion. My photos disappeared off my compact flash card.

If you are comfortable with the command line and have the developer tools installed, this URL gives you a free solution for recovering the images:

http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/oskin/saveimg.html

But I also wonder, since the CF card is just a DOS file system, if any old disk 'undelete' tool would work to recover the images?



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iPhoto 2.0 warning about Erase Camera Contents
Authored by: Anonymous on Jan 16, '04 04:34:17PM

Yes indeedy. I did it a couple years ago. A local private school decided to make coffee mugs for the parents with their kids picture on it. They rounded up all the kids and we had a photographer who took 2 to 3 digital photos of each kid. I received a call later that day from the photographer who said she had accidently erased ALL the photos. Rather than call the school and admit we were idiots, I drove over and tried Norton, and was able to unerase every single photo.



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iPhoto 2.0 warning about Erase Camera Contents
Authored by: outofcontrol on Jan 16, '04 08:22:01PM

Well darn,

If I had half a brain and was thinking, I could have saved 52 really great Christmas images of my kids because iPhoto did an import and deleted the images on the flash card. Only problem is that the photos never appeared in iPhoto or anywhere else.

I will know for next time about this. Thank you very much for this knowledge!



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This is really a full disk problem
Authored by: Ockham on Jan 16, '04 11:02:56PM

No offense, but this "hint" should be more along the lines of:

"be sure to leave some space free on your hard disk if you want to save your data."

Although this is an unexpected side effect with iPhoto it is certainly not unusual to have a whole slew of problems with a full disk, especially a system disk with swap files.



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This is really a full disk problem
Authored by: corradokid on Jan 17, '04 04:05:33AM

Not only just to save your pictures, but OS X needs at least 1GB free space for swap files and other maintenance it performs. Jaguar would begin to corrupt preference files when disk space ran out, but Panther may throw up a warning when space gets low.



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This is really a full disk problem
Authored by: stnihXsocam on Jan 18, '04 03:09:19PM

I would agree - I was on vacation and let my PowerBook get to the point where I actually got the dialog "Disk is full" and had all sorts of problems with iPhoto, burning CD's, etc. I was going to burn an iPhoto archive DVD, but I couldn't do that because there wasn't enough room to set up the disc image before the burn! Luckily, I happened to be carrying a 20Gig hard drive in my pocket - man that Firewire mode on the iPod really came to the rescue. Deleted some tunes, offloaded about 7 Gigs of photos and iMovies, and I was back in business. The bottom line - DO NOT let your boot disc get full!



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iPhoto 2.0 warning about Erase Camera Contents
Authored by: Mac112 on Jan 17, '04 07:49:52AM

I lost all pictures in the camera when the batteries ran out during import... The camera said the card was not formatted. Took the card out and put it in a USB-reader and my pictures were all there! I suppose Mac OS X did som simple repairs as it mountet the card?



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iPhoto 2.0 warning about Erase Camera Contents
Authored by: troynhui on Jan 18, '04 07:17:37PM

I've also learned not to delete automatically while importing photos.

Now days I use Apple's own Image Capture application to browse the photos on my camera and delete those I don't want imported into iPhoto. Once I've imported the remaining photos into iPhoto, I use Image Capture to delete them off the camera.

It's a bit of extra work, but ensures that mistakes don't happen.



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Watch your RAW files disappear!
Authored by: paulrob on Jan 19, '04 11:33:58AM

I got a similar problem when importing from a card a mixture of TIFF and Olympus RAW files. The TIFF files turned up on my HDD no problem, but although iPhoto noted the presence of the RAW files, it didn't import them, but did erase them from the card!

Some hocus-pocus with FAT formats via a friends PC solved the prob.

And I've set Image Capture to start an Applescript to upload the images rather than iPhoto.



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