I've been battling with iPhoto for the last couple days and there's no light at the end of the tunnel. My iPhoto library is around 10GB and all I want to do is to back it up. Easy, just drop in a blank DVD, select an Album and click "Burn". Well, that's that I thought, but it then started to go all wrong.

First off, I did manage to burn one of my smaller albums (~500MB) to CD, so I know that the concept works. It's just that I can't burn anything else. The album I first noticed this with is around 3GB. Since iPhoto adds its own metadata and backs up files that you edit, I've confirmed the size of the album through the Finder. Yep, it's 3GB. So, insert a 4.7GB blank DVD, click burn and after a short period of time, I just get a generic "failed to communicate with device" error. Okay, so I'll try just exporting the album (this just copies the photos out from iPhoto) onto the DVD instead. I get the following error.

WTF! 4.7GB on the disk means that there's plenty of space. Okay, perhaps iPhoto coastered the disk (which it did, thanks Apple), so I try exporting the same album to my harddisk. Same problem, and there's 14GB free! Hmm, what about exporting to my external Lacie disk? Same problem, and yet 200GB free!

A quick Google around and I discover that this is a fairly common problem with iPhoto 4.0 - the solution being to upgrade to 4.0.1. That's odd, I'm using 4.0.3! Out of desparation, I've tried repairing the library (crashes iPhoto at the end of the process), dumping the preferences file (didn't work) and I even reinstalled iPhoto from the iLife '04 disk (also didn't work).

The final thing I've tried is very intriguing and hints at a bug somewhere. Using the disk utility, I created a disk image of 4.7GB (the same as a DVD) and tried to export the album directly to it. It failed with the same error. Next, I created a slightly smaller disk image (3.5GB) and tried again. Exporting worked! How weird is that - exporting to a smaller "disk" did the trick, which I think explains why burning straight to DVD doesn't work - there's too much capacity. ;-)

There's a really easy way to export an album from iPhoto - just drag the photos into a Finder window. So while I can back up my collection, iPhoto clearly isn't working as advertised. To be honest, I'm getting a little fed up with iPhoto. Of all the Apple applications, iPhoto is the one that I always have trouble with. When it was free, I would have been more tolerant of it. But now it's not, well...

So why am I posting this on my blog rather than raising a bug request? Well, the other thing that annoys me is that getting support from Apple is a very one way process (unless you phone them up or go into an Apple store). It's not very obvious how you actually raise a bug report because you have to submit it via their "feedback" form and I have no idea whether Apple employees actually look at the discussion forums on their site. I've done both and am awaiting a response. The only other bugs I've raised with Apple were also iPhoto related and experience says I'll be waiting a while.

Responses[1]

Posted by Simon Brown on 19 August 2005 22:52:41 BST #