When iPhoto Decides To Take A Massive Dump

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Like many, I have a lot of photos on my computer. I try my best to back them up on CDs and by uploading them to Flickr in the case technology fails me, but more often than not, I get lazy or forget.   The last thing I expected however, was for my entire iPhoto library to simply disappear. Poof. Gone. I was in the middle of organizing newly uploaded photos of my adorable niece and nephew when the library just went blank and read "0 photos in library."

Immediately, I panicked and started talking to myself, telling myself to calm down and that this wasn't really happening.  Over 8,000 pictures just gone within a split second. I googled the problem what seemed like a hundred different ways and read several Mac forums indicating that this seems to be a common problem. What? Why? I can't seem to figure out what went wrong but after hours and hours of researching and searching for photos, I was able to locate my images on my hard drive. Most people aren't that lucky. Although this meant that not all was lost, it also meant that I had to go through every single image my hard drive has ever saved. It was a complete nightmare. Moral of the story, back your stuff up. I'm going to share what I've learned in hopes that this won't happen to anyone else.
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I just needed to stop at the statement "Over 8,000 pictures just gone within a split second." Why in the world did I have that many photos saved on my laptop to begin with? That's just not necessary. Free up space on your computer and back up your images on an external hard drive or on the Internet to avoid the hassle of having to try to save thousands of photos in the case your computer fails you. I'm not saying delete every photo you upload, just consolidate. If you transfer the files to an external hard drive, you can also refer back to them.

An external hard drive is worth the investment. Buy one today. Once you buy one, be sure to make it a routine to back up your files every time you add new files to your computer.

If you have time machine on your MacBook, figure out how it works and make sure it updates  often. It backs up everything on your computer. Again, something I've ignored up until now. I believe PCs have a similar backup system.

Save your photos online on Facebook or a photo website. Just make sure it doesn't sync with your computer's photo library. Flickr will most likely delete your photos in the event that your iPhoto crashes if you have it set to sync. However, Flickr has made it extremely easy to upload photos now, you simply drag and drop instead of manually choosing the photos and clicking upload. Uploading a large batch of photos took less than a minute with the drag and drop feature.

External hard drives can crash too, look into downloading some type of cloud storage like Dropbox. It's really handy, user friendly and saves all of your files online so you can access them anywhere, anytime.

Bloggers, if you are using Blogger read this important article about how to make sure you don't lose your photos when switching to Google+.

How do you keep your files safe?