over the weekend i fucked up iphoto and lost everything. how? why? well, there are a couple things i was unhappy with iphoto. small things. stupid things. i don't know how, but somehow i inputted comments into the master comment window and now i can't get rid of it because when no photos are selected, you cannot click into the comments window. but there it is. my accidental typings from a few weeks ago in the comments window when nothing is selected. damn. i hate it. i want to get rid of it. the other thing that was bugging me was that i had taken a few photos at a really large resolution setting and i didn't want them hogging up so much room. you cannot resize in iphoto, just crop. perhaps resize is a feature available in iphoto 5? don't know. so i resized the photos in photoshop but iphoto still displays the old width/height/file size. i didn't want to read incorrect data so the way i figured that iphoto would refresh the info (there is no refresh file data info button) is to crop the photo then edit undo. only it freaks out iphoto to do this and would crash each time. i was too impatient to do this for the 5-7 photos so i thought i should just erase the database and start with a clean slate. it would rebuild a new one and everything would be alright. genius! mistake #1. also, i have a terrible tendency to immediately empty the trash as soon i delete anything so that i can look at how much space i have recovered by taking out the trash. mistake #2.

when i opened up iphoto, none of the photos displayed. the folder and photos were still there, they were just not displaying in iphoto. i think i also deleted the file that stores the comments, keywords, etc. great. what the fuck am i to do? how in the hell am i going to recall what all the comments and keywords are AND retype them? luckily, back in new zealand, the night before we embarked on our travels, i backed up all the important stuff on my portable hard drive. i fired that up and copied stuff over and iphoto was back to normal with my photos and comments but only up until the night before traveling. which means i have a ridiculous amount of photos (maybe another 2000) that need to be imported back into iphoto. ok, i did that. no comments! fuck!

the other thing i did over the weekend that really saved me in this restoration project was that i finally signed up for flickr to check out what that's all about. i quickly exhausted the upload limit for the free account and decided to pay for the pro account. i found a script that works beautifully with iphoto and uploads your comments as well to flickr. i put up over 1000 of my nz photos on flickr and began the painstaking task of copying and pasting the comments on flickr back to iphoto. it wasn't so bad. a lot of the photos are in the same area so they have the same comments. i was able to restore everything in 2-3 days.