iPhoto 8.0.3 updater bug bites many

Yesterday I tried to open up iPhoto '09, and was greeted with a screen telling me that my iPhoto library needed to be updated. This was sort of odd, since I had run the program many times since the software update of June 4th bringing the program to version 8.0.3, but what the heck. I clicked on upgrade and the program crashed displaying one of the wonderfully unclear error screens of hex numbers.

After trying all the usual things like rebooting, resetting the PRAM and saying 'Candyman' three times in front of a mirror, I sheepishly gave up and called Apple. It turned out that this has been happening to many people. Up until two days ago, Apple had been capturing reports to find the source. I was told that they stopped capturing reports when they numbered around 3,000.

What Apple found was a bug in the 8.0.3 updater, and apparently the bug could bite just about anytime since it didn't necessarily rear its head directly after the update. The bug, in various incarnations with various solutions, is to be cursorily found in the support forums, but here is the authorized Apple fix:

Hold down the option key as you boot iPhoto and you'll see a screen like the one displayed here. Just choose your library (there should only be one) and iPhoto will boot normally. Problem solved! As of now the problem hasn't resurfaced for me, and according to Apple tech support, it shouldn't. This bug will be squashed in a future iPhoto update but for now it's easy to get around.

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iLife Software Troubleshooting

Yesterday I tried to open up iPhoto '09, and was greeted with a screen telling me that my iPhoto library needed to be updated. This was...

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VanillaSpice

So much for "Welcome to the Social".

or "Coke Adds Life".

or "Easy As Dell".

Shock, horror. Sometimes, the slogans that companies use do not 100% reflect reality. So much for caveat emptor.

June 14 2009 at 10:39 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Mark Keyes

happened to me and took it to a Mac Genius. Got it working with no problems.... hasnt resurfaced....

June 14 2009 at 3:35 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

kirkv

The iDisk sync failure is also deceiving in that you will get a message saying "there was a problem publishing the album" from iPhoto saying that your MobileMe account information is incorrect when you try to access an published photo album. Even signing out of MobileMe and trying again with the correct login info doesn't seem to fix the issue.

June 14 2009 at 2:36 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Mark

There's another isue with this: in the top level directory under "iPhoto Library", "Data" used to be a directory by itself. Now it is a symlink pointing to the directory "Data.noindex". This breaks iDisk synching. If you run with your iPhoto library based on your iDisk, iDisk will fail to synch, as that file system does not support symlinks.

June 14 2009 at 12:40 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

malexandria

I think there's a bug in iTunes after the last Update, I'm no longer able to Consolidate my entire Library, I went to Consolidate yesterday and it craps out half way through the process, my library is now a broken mess.

June 14 2009 at 7:56 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

anthony77

This is a content issue in your iPhoto Library, and it happens to people all the time, it could be a misplaced album or folder in the library package has been opened, or it could be a video clip from your camera or even a plug in with iPhoto could do the trick as well... I wouldn't say this is a bug just because you had to rebuild your library... 99 out of 100 times as a tech support agent for Apple, the issue is always content, and it sounds like this is the case by what you described... don't blame software unless you rooted everything else out... just my two cents...

June 14 2009 at 1:54 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

nbidgood

i also had the delayed "library update" message several days (and a few openings of iphoto) after installing the update. however, my library updated without issue. in fact, it updated quite fast, considering i have 13,000+ photos in my library.

June 14 2009 at 12:52 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

my89z24

My guess is it happens if you install the update but don't start iPhoto right away. What happened to me is I installed the update and then later recorded a video using photo booth and told it to add it to iPhoto which then launched and started giving me the error described. I restored from backup and then started iPhoto and then did the video import, worked fine.

June 14 2009 at 12:12 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to my89z24's comment

David Winograd

Yup, just about the same thing happened to me.
When Photo Booth was trying to open iPhoto the problem occurred.

I wonder if we have a pattern here.

Has anyone who has experienced this been anywhere around Photo Booth when iPhoto exploded?

June 14 2009 at 12:40 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

jagger27

So much for a troll free blog.
Every OS has bugs. Not every company fixes them, but Apple does.

June 13 2009 at 11:32 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Ted

You can't even drag maps anymore in Places. All it does is drag a map tile around. This is so annoying.

June 13 2009 at 8:51 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to Ted's comment

MacSlut

Dr. Spaceman, "You can't even drag maps anymore in Places."

I ran into that bug, and had to delete my com.apple.iPhoto.plist file located at ~/Library/Preferences/.

You might want to back up this file instead of deleting it as it contains all of your iPhoto preferences, but it fixed everything for me.

June 13 2009 at 11:24 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply