Summary: This article includes best Mac photo recovery solutions which can help you recover missing iPhoto/Photos pictures after macOS update or any other photo recovery situations.

Photos provides the repair functions to fix for the broken and version-incompatible photo library. If the Photos app on the Mac is open, choose Photos - Quit Photos. Hold down Option-Command and double-click the Photos icon in the Applications folder. In the Repair Library window, click Repair to rebuild your photo library. Click the Use as System Photo Library button. If you open a second or different library in the Photos app, and you haven't designated it as the System Photo Library, other applications will use photos from the original System Photo Library. Hold down the Option key when you open Photos to see which library is set as the System Photo Library. If a message saying ‘photos cannot find the System Photo Library' pops-up on the screen, do not panic. In such scenarios, people often think that they have lost all their collection of photos. Though it is a visible reaction, it is not necessarily the case. The reason why the photos cannot find System Photo Library could be different every time. Just because you CAN get to your photos that way, does not mean you SHOULD. Mucking about in the iPhoto Library in finder will cause the app to not be able to find your photos, and will render the app useless to you. Apple put that file in a 'package' so that users would stay out of that file and not corrupt their photo database. Recover Photos Disappeared from Mac via Photo Library Repair. Photo library is the database where all photo files, thumbnails, metadata info, etc. If you find the library folder but see no photos in it, then it may get corrupted. But luckily, both iPhoto and Photos app allow users to Repair your photo library when photos or photo albums.

Nowadays, many of us don't have physical photo albums like we did decades ago, as everything is now digital and is stored online or on our computers and smart devices. Photographs and images aren't just there to entertain us, they're there to record history. Many of life's greatest moments are captured on camera from a fantastic holiday abroad, to a child's first steps. If anything were to happen to these images, we would feel as if we'd lost a part of ourselves.

Sadly, some people unfortunately lose important images thanks to modern technology, which is what we're looking at today. Losing iPhoto images is tough, but there is a solution in the form of deleted photo recovery software, and we're going to share that solution with you today.

Note: Since OS X Yosemite 10.10.3, the photo library app iPhoto has been replaced with Photos.

Common problems

First up, we're going to share a few common photo recovery problems that our customers have encountered, before giving you a solution. Here is a recent email that we received from a concerned customer who feared that they'd lost close to 2000 iPhoto images.

Hey guys, I hope you can help as I'm desperate. I had around 1,900 iPhoto photographs saved. While some of these were boring images I hadn't gotten around to erasing yet, many of them were images of my son as a baby. In these images, I could swipe through and literally watch him grow older right before my eyes. Now I can't find them anywhere. After I upgraded to Mojave/High Sierra I only had 224 photos left, and could not find them anywhere. Worst of all is that the ones I do have left are typically the ones that I would quite happily have deleted if I'd thought to do so. They're also not on the cloud as that was the first place I checked. The images have gone from all of my devices, and I'm at my wits' end.

I was reading up on your recent guide to recover deleted photos and came across your site. I hope you can help? I've also been reading up about High Sierra upgrades and it seems as if this is a fairly-common problem as well. If you can help me get these images back I will be eternally grateful to you.

As you can see, the customer in question was clearly distressed as she was emotionally attached to the images that just randomly decided to disappear after she upgraded to macOS High Sierra. High Sierra upgrading is common because it is one of the most widely installed Mac operating systems at present. The problem is that it comes with some pretty significant changes. These changes don't seem to be going down too well with Mac devices, or Mac users for that matter. This is because many Mac users have sadly lost their videos, images, and other important documents after upgrading to macOS High Sierra. Missing iPhoto images is a particularly common problem, which is why we're looking at deleted photo recovery in today's article. The aim of this article is to help you retrieve your iPhoto images after upgrading to Catalina/Mojave/High Sierra.

What is High Sierra?

First, we'll take a quick look at what High Sierra is. macOS High Sierra is the 13th Operating System for the Apple Macintosh computer. It was released back in late 2017 and was named after the High Sierra region of California. As beneficial as High Sierra was, the main issue that Mac users had was the fact that, after upgrading from macOS Sierra, many users found that their iPhotos were randomly going missing from their iPhoto photo libraries for no obvious reasons.

Deleted photo recovery solutions

If your iPhotos have done the disappearing act on you after you upgraded, and you aren't quite sure why, try any of the following solutions and with any luck, your photos should be back in your iPhoto library in no time at all.

Solution 1: Recover missing iPhoto pictures from Time Machine

The first photo recovery solution we're going to talk to you about today involves the use of Time Machine. No, we're not talking about the use of an actual time machine, although that would sure come in handy. No, the time machine we're talking about today is the Time Machine backup. You see, if you created a backup via Time Machine before you upgraded to Catalina/Mojave/High Sierra, you can simply use Time Machine restore missing or deleted data including documents and iPhoto images. Here's a step by step rundown of how to do precisely this:

Step 1: Connect the backup drive to the Mac computer.

Step 2: Open iPhoto folder.

Step 3: Click the Time Machine icon in the top left menu bar and select Enter Time Machine.

Tips: Did you know how to show Time Machine icon on the menu bar?

1. Click Apple icon at the top-right corner.
2. Select System Preferences… and then click on Time Machine.
3. Check Show Time Machine in menu bar.

Step 4: Browse the items in the backup folder by using on screen up/down arrows or using the timeline at the edge of the screen. If you want to find files of older version, using timeline to navigate the files is faster. You will be able to see a lot of snapshots of this whole folder and how the folder changes.

Step 5: Select an item and prese Space bar or double-click it to preview it.

Step 6: Select the photo you want to restore, and then click Restore.

Solution 2: Switch from iPhoto to photos

Next up, we're going to quickly walk you through how you can switch from iphoto iPhoto to Photos. You see, on the newer operating systems, the photos Photos app has been updated to have many more features that the iPhoto app doesn't have. Any changes that happen to be made in iPhotos won't be included in photosPhotos, and vice-versa. If you can't find the images you want in the iPhotos library, quit the application and open up the photos Photos library instead. To do so, just follow the upcoming steps:

With any luck, the images that you thought were gone forever will instead be found here.

Solution 3: Enjoy recently deleted photo recovery with iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac

If the other two solutions haven't provided you with any real luck, it's time for you to break out your secret weapon. When it comes to deleted photo recovery software, if the other solutions haven't restored your precious images, iBoysoft Data Recovery Software for Mac is your last chance. It has been generating a lot of positive feedback lately, and as more and more people discover how effective it really is, this number is only going to grow.

iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac is professional data recovery software that is very effective for recovering lost iPhoto images after upgrading to Mojave/High Sierra. Whether you're looking to retrieve images, videos, audio files, texts, documents, or anything else, iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac is surely your best chance, especially in the absence of a successful backup. Best of all is the fact that using this piece of software is incredibly easy, and can be achieved, literally, with a few clicks. Here is a step by step guide on how to recover lost iPhoto pictures after upgrading to Catalina/Mojave/High Sierra.

Step 1: Free download, install, and launch iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac software. This software is completely free to download, and can be installed and launched in a matter of seconds.

Step 2: Once you've downloaded and launched the free online deleted photo recovery software, your next step is to select the drive/partition in which the photos went missing. Now click ‘next' in order to scan for any lost files located on the drive/partition. This process should not take very long at all.

Step 3: Now it's time for you to preview the initial scanning results. Preview the scan results to see which photos you wish to recover. Once you see the images you wish to recover, you simply click on the ‘recover' Recover' button.

More about iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac

There are countless examples of free Mac data recovery pieces of software out there for you to choose from, but some are unfortunately not very reliable, nor are they that effective. Finding a reliable and trustworthy piece of free data recovery software is essential, which is why iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac comes so very highly recommended. It is considered by a number of users to be the absolute best free data recovery software option on the market today. This software is ideal, in that it supports the recovery of deleted photos, videos, documents, emails and music files and much more.

These can be recovered from external hard drives including: USB drives, SD cards, memory cards, pen drives, and more. What's more, the software is even able to recover lost data from APFS formatted SD cards, corrupt SD cards, unmountable SD cards, inaccessible external hard drives on various MAC models, and much more besides. It is simple to use, very effective, and best of all is the fact that the software can be downloaded and installed completely free.

Relatred articles:How to take and recover screenshots using Mac?

Why should you choose iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac?

There are many benefits associated with utilizing iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac software. While we won't list each benefit, we are going to look at some of the main reasons why so many users all over the globe are choosing iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac as their go-to photo recovery application.

It supports APFS drive data recovery

One of the main reasons why iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac is proving to be so popular is because of the fact that it supports APFS drive data recovery. In fact, many consider it to be the best APFS drive data recovery software because it enables users to recovery Time Machine backups from APFS disks. Not only that, it also allows us to retrieve any lost data which we may have incurred, after deleting an APFS container. In fact, as far as APFS drive data recovery goes, there's plenty of options. These include:

• Recover lost data from encrypted APFS drive
• Recover lost data from formatted APFS drive
• Recover lost data from unmountable APFS drive
• Recover lost data from inaccessible APFS drive
• Recover lost data from APFS Volume
• And more..

Preview recovered data

Another benefit of this particular data recovery software is the fact that it enables users to preview recovered data before they decide whether they wish to permanently restore it as it once was. This is useful because it allows users to preview all unique file formats supported by Apple. These include: image, audio, video and file. This is useful because it helps save time and ensures that you don't accidentally restore the wrong files by mistake.

Deep scan and quick scan modes

The third benefit of this particular piece of data recovery software is the fact that it provides users with both: a deep scan mode, and a quick scan mode, allowing them to save time, or to search deep within the Mac device for the data that they happen to be searching for.

Highly compatible

Finally, the last benefit of iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac software that we're going to be looking at today, is the fact that it is so highly compatible. As well as being able to recover lost data from the APFS drive, it will also recover lost data from:

• File systems: APFS, encrypted APFS, HFS+, FAT32, exFAT
• Storage devices: hard drives, external hard drives, USB flash drives, SD cards, etc.
• Mac operating systems: macOS 10.14, 10.13, 10.12, 10.11,10.10, 10.9, 10.8, 10.7

Still have questions?

Steve Thomas is trying to clean things up across two Macs:

I’m finding that there are photos EVERYWHERE on these two machines—Photos library, iPhoto library, Photo Booth library, multiple file folders on dozens of different levels and in countless locations.

He already owns PhotoSweeper, an app that handles de-duplication, but he’s frustrated at having to select all the folders that contain photos in order to perform a scan and then sort through the results.

How can I possibly find ALL the photos I have regardless of where they’re stored, then move or copy them into one central location for editing, storage, and backup?

It’s certainly two different questions and tasks: finding and consolidating photos, and then making sure you don’t have multiple copies of the same images. You might think you just want to do the former, but it’s very likely you’ll have two or more copies of many images if your images are scattered about drives and multiple computers.

You can use either macOS Spotlight or a third-party tool to find all images by file type and then copy them. I can’t figure out a good way to consolidate access to all images without copying them into a single location. This leaves the originals in their spread-out locations, but that may be simpler to clear out once you know you have them all captured.

Bluestacks mac keyboard mapping. The simplest way to do this with Spotlight is via a Finder-based search, for which you can create a Smart Folder to repeat it later without losing the window settings. You have to go through a little rigamarole to get the fields you need:

1. Press Command-Option-spacebar to create a Finder Spotlight search window.
2. In the upper-right corner, click the plus (+) button.
3. Now hold down the Option key, and the plus button in the upper right next to the entry that was created (which starts “Name” and “matches”) changes to an ellipsis (…). Click that.
4. The ellipsis button creates an Any of the Following Are True entry, which is what you need to have multiple criteria for images in a single search. Any is the right selection, so you can leave that alone.
5. Under Any, change the pop-up buttons to Kind, Image, and JPEG.
6. Click the + at the end of that line, and create a field with Kind, Image, and TIFF.
7. Repeat step 6 for GIF and PNG (and BMP, if you think you have any of that format, primarily used in Windows).
8. Click the Save button in the upper right so you can recall these criteria if something goes wrong. Name it something like “Find all images by type”. (When you click Save after naming, the criteria disappear and the Smart Folder icon and name appear the top of the window. You can click the Action (gear) menu and choose Show Search Criteria to display them.)
9. Set up the destination to which you want to copy all images, like a folder or hard drive.
10. In the results window, click and then press Command-A or choose File > Select All.
11. Drag the selection to the new destination.

Step 11 can be problematic. On my Mac, this search produces 171,499 images, and dragging and dropping that many images can cause the system to rainbow-spin for a long time or even lock up.

You can probably shave down which images you want by excluding very small ones. I’ve found that a lot of apps embed or download HTML-based help files, so many tiny images can be associated with them.

I had you leave the Name field in place earlier above where you set up the Any criteria. Go back to the field (see Step 8 to show criteria), and then change Name to File Size, Is Greater Than, and enter a small number, like 3 next to the KB popup. You might even go to 30K or 100K—it’s unlikely, though not impossible, that images that small will be photos you’re looking for, as opposed to graphics associated with documents or help files.

There’s one problem with the above method: it includes all images nested in your Photos, iPhoto, and other libraries. If you’ve already synced or copied those, you can exclude those libraries temporarily while you perform your search:

1. Open the Spotlight system preference pane.
2. Click the Privacy tab.
3. Drag each library in that you want to exclude.
4. Perform the search and copy above.
5. Return to the Privacy tab and delete the libraries from the list.

An alternative to the Finder is third-party disk-searching software. I tested out HoudahSpot, which relies on Spotlight and lets you define and save criteria in a similar way. But it’s easier to set up and edit more complicated searches, and while you can drag and drop results, you can also use a Copy menu item, which avoids the rainbow spinner and Finder lockup. You can also exclude locations from results, which gives it a leg up in avoiding extra or unwanted copies from photo-app libraries.

As far as de-duplication, PhotoSweeper ($10) seems a reasonable choice. The current version works with Photos, Aperture, iPhoto, and Lightroom, as well as any folder it’s pointed at. (We haven’t reviewed a version since 2012 (version 1.7); we’ll review a new version in the near future.)

I’ve also recommended PowerPhotos ($30) if you’re just trying to find and clean out duplicates within Photos or iPhoto, as it comes with a number of other powerful missing features for album and library management. (PowerPhotos works with Photos, but the price includes a license for iPhoto Library Manager to work with the that older Apple app.)

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Can't Find Photos Library On Mac

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