The other day I was compiling a list of my favourite photos in iPhoto that I’ve taken, because I’m thinking of adding in a favourites section on my blog. I was scanning through my many photos from our Disney World honeymoon, when I realized that one of my sets from the Magic Kingdom wasn’t there! A few months back, I was trying out Aperture, and thought that it was really amazing and decided to import all my photos from iPhoto into Aperture and us it as my default editing program…Mistake #1…I had then deleted all of my iPhoto library because I don’t have a backup hard drive yet, and I didn’t want duplicate files on my hard drive. After about an hour or so I was getting really frustrated and simply missed my iPhoto! How could I have turned my back on it! BUT it was a nightmare trying to get all my photos back into iPhoto, and somehow I ended up with alot of duplicates(I think this was due to the Modified/Originals folder structure that iPhoto creates when editing within its program)…so I had to comb through my folders trying to sort out the duplicates and get my library back to some sort of order. Long story short, I think I survived the mini crisis with only a few lost hours of sleep…until the other week when I realized that I had erased a set of my beloved photos from Disney World!

Enter Mistake #2…I have a bad habit of not labeling… if at all backing up my photos correctly. I at random will write something on a DVD that I’ve burnt and toss it into the black binder of doom, only to be forgotten and cursed at such as this evening. I went through that entire binder and I couldn’t find the photo set anywhere! Flickr to the rescue! I knew that I had uploaded all of my photos to Flickr, so I quickly searched and found a program that I could download my photos back to my computer… The only problem is when uploading the photos to Flickr, the resolution was reduced ever so slightly, so I have my photos back, but not super awesome quality that my old Canon Rebel produced.

The program is called Flickr Backup… give it a try…it just might save you too!

Here is a screen grab:

Lesson learned… back up, back up your backups…and then properly label your backups so that you don’t become an idiot like me and delete your precious memories!

Filed under: Software on May 31st, 2007