iPhoto 5: The Missing Manual, Fourth Edition

iPhoto Backups

Bad things can happen to digital photos. They can be accidentally deleted with a slip of your pinkie. They can become mysteriously corrupted and subsequently unopenable. They can get mangled by a crashed hard disk and be lost forever. Losing one-of-a-kind family photos can be extremely painful, and in some documented cases, even marriage-threatening. So if you value your digital photos, you should back them up regularly—perhaps after each major batch of new photos joins your collection.

Backing Up to CD or DVD

The quickest and most convenient way to back up your Photo Library is to archive it onto a blank CD or DVD using iPhoto’s Burn command, as described on the previous pages. (If you don’t have a disc-burning drive, don’t worry; the next section explains how to perform a complete iPhoto backup without burning a disc.)

If anything bad ever happens to your photo collection, you’ll be able to restore your Photo Library from the backup discs, with all your thumbnails, keywords, comments, and other tidbits intact.

To restore your photo collection from such a backup, see “Merging Photo Libraries” later in this chapter.

Backing Up (No CD Burner)

Fortunately, even if you don’t have a CD burner (and therefore can’t use iPhoto’s Burn command), backing up thousands of photos is a simple task for the iPhoto maven. After all, one of iPhoto’s main jobs is to keep all your photos together in one place—one folder that’s easy to copy to a backup disk of any kind.

That all-important folder ...