Chapter 9. Troubleshooting

9. Troubleshooting

The world of iPhoto is no more a perfect place than the real world. No one, iPhoto's developers least of all, wants problems, but bugs are a fact of life, and you may have a problem with iPhoto at some point.

One advantage iPhoto has in this respect is that it runs only under Mac OS X, which boasts a feature called protected memory. That means that if one program, such as iPhoto, crashes, no other program should be affected. Also on the positive side is the fact that iPhoto saves your changes frequently and automatically, so you're unlikely to lose much work even if it crashes. Put simply, if iPhoto crashes, just relaunch the program and pick up where you left off. If the crashes happen regularly, you may need to do some troubleshooting. One way or another, keep good backups! (See "Backing Up Your Photos" in Chapter 2, "Importing and Managing Photos.")

Of course, most of the problems you might encounter won't result in a crash. It's more likely you'll have trouble importing photos from an unusual camera, printing a photo at the exact size you want, or dealing with thumbnails that don't display properly. Those are the sorts of problemsand solutionsI'll focus on in this chapter.

The Trouble with Bugs

Many iPhoto problems that I've seen people report seem to be specific to their photos, a particular iPhoto Library folder, their Mac, or the phase of the moon, and I have been unable to reproduce them. I still include here the potential problem and any solutions I've heard of or can think of, but this uncertainty makes it impossible for me to say when or if Apple has fixed the incorrect behavior. As such, some of the problems and solutions listed in this chapter may no longer apply to iPhoto 6; there's simply no way to tell.

I continue to include these suggestions even when I can't verify them because bugs are slippery, and just because I can't reproduce a particular problem in this or any other version of iPhoto doesn't mean that you won't experience it. And then one of the suggestions in this chapter may save your bacon (or at least your photos).

Also keep in mind that updates to iPhoto very well may eliminate even those problems I've confirmed in iPhoto 6, so be sure to use Software Update to check for new versions on a regular basis.