Several months ago we had one of those moments that anyone with a digital camera dreads; the loss of a large proportion of our library due to mysterious forces of darkness. Well actually it was my fault really as I was trying to clean up the library into nice tidy archivable chunks and make iPhoto actually able to cope with the volume of images without being totally glacial. As we had been taking about a thousand a month it had got to a pretty dire state. Anyway a mishap involving a symbolic link and the delete key resulted in sheer total and complete loss of everything from April thru June. Or so we thought.

This afternoon while nosing around the file-system of our large laptop I discovered that dispite their disappearance from iPhoto, all the files were still kicking around! For some reason the xml manifests had been clobbered but not the actual files! Hooray! The images in question have now been duly re-integrated into our collection. We are paricularly pleased to have various "personal" pictures back as well as whole batches of stuff from Jumbles and Williamson Park.