Mar 18, '05 10:08:00AM • Contributed by: Anonymous
If I try to copy the library whole hog from CD to the hard disk, I get all the photos in the library, but I lose the album information, since these are stored via a symbolic or hard link on the CD library, and the Finder doesn't copy them correctly. I tried cp -R srcdir destdir and tar -cf - -C srcdir . | tar xpf - -C destdir from the Terminal, but these don't copy the links correctly either!
As a last resort, I tried compressing the CD photo library with Stuffit, and then uncompressing it onto the hard disk. The album links worked correctly, and when I forced iPhoto to use that unstuffed directory as the photo library, all my albums were there (after iPhoto5 upgraded the library to the current format). Then you can burn the albums or library to a CD-RW. Switch back to your original iPhoto library, insert the new CD, and copy over all the old albums into your new library.
This discussion on the Apple forums mentions that you have to be careful about how you burn the libraries to CD for iPhoto to recognize them. The albums are not included when you just select the photos or the entire library.
