[DM-MUG] iPhoto warning (long)

[Matt W]

Be aware (or beware) of iPhoto 4.03!

As usual, before doing any 10.3.5 or iPhoto updates MAKE A BACKUP AND 
TEST IT FOR RESTORE, which I did. Sorry to yell, but I'm testing iPhoto 
4.03 for a second time to see if it will read/import all of my photos.

The story so far: I updated 4.01 to 4.02 when it arrived in Software 
Update. I then moved a backup DVD of my photo library to another Mac. 
When I tried to import into 4.02, it failed spectacularly. The import 
took 3 hours (and never really finished). It duplicated *most* of my 
photos (as in 2 copies in the display window), required a force-quit, 
and generally behaved inappropriately.

To fix, I repaired permissions, ran fsck in single-user mode, deleted 
the whole iPhoto Library folder (resident inside the Pictures folder of 
my user account) and manually copied the iPhoto Library folder from the 
DVD to the Pictures folder. THIS TIME it worked much better, but then I 
notice 4.03 is released. Something is amiss. I also noted that 4.03 
required me to update my iPhoto Library and that it wouldn't work with 
older versions.

Well, I used my backup because iPhoto 4.03 lost the ability to read 
some images that Preview opens up fine. I cannot even add these images 
via Import or drag to the iPhoto window. These images are in the proper 
place inside the Pictures folder in the same hierarchy as they 
previously were. iPhoto 4.03 just gives me an error when I try to add 
them again. If these missing photos hadn't been at the very beginning 
of my library, I might have missed them. Yes, they still exist in the 
folder, but iPhoto doesn't see them. Out of 3000+ I'm not sure how many 
I'm missing.

I'm back to 4.01 (custom install of iLife 2004 and manual update to 
4.01 which JUST happened to be in a cache file on my hard drive) and 
will be testing 4.03 further until I can get it working more reliably.

Hope I'm the only one, but since 4.02 was pulled, I wonder... Macfixit 
(www.macfixit.com) has a few reports of strange behavior with 4.03. I 
wish Apple would stop using us as beta testers (argh!)

Matthew
TechnicalMac