My wife’s MacBook has developed a weird problem in iPhoto.
She has been trying to drag photos out to a desktop folder, so she can upload them to a printing service. She’s found several photos that she can’t drag out. Most seem to work fine, but these won’t permit the file to be dragged.
Normally when you drag a photo out you get the green “plus sign” overlay icon, meaning a copy will be made. On these photos, she gets the “no smoking” slash-circle symbol.
Other symptoms:
Right-click and “Show File” brings up a Finder window that shows the root disks of the machine. Normally you would get the folder where the photo lives, with the photo selected.
If you double-click the photo to bring up the large view, you get a big pixellated question mark. Normally you’d get the large version of the photo.
It’s as if the photo’s entry is still in the database/index, but the actual photo file has gone missing.
I’ve tried a systemwide Repair Permissions in Disk Utility. I also started iPhoto up while holding cmd + opt, and selected several options:
- Rebuild the photos’ small thumbnails
- Recover orphaned photos in the iPhoto Library folder
- Examine and repair iPhoto Library file permissions
- Rebuild the iPhoto Library Database from automatic backup
- Reclaim unused disk space from databases
(In other words, the only option I did not try was “Rebuild all of the photos’ thumbnails.)
I’ve tried going into Time Machine, searching back to the oldest occurrence of the image I could find, and restoring it.
So far, nothing’s worked. I’m starting to fear filesystem corruption.
Anybody with any ideas, please let me know. If you already know my email address or have me on Facebook, feel free to contact me there. If you have neither, you can drop me a line using my contact form.