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no.one

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 15, 2011
4
0
Hello All,

I'm a long-time Mac user, and I had a 2011 (maybe 2012) Mac mini I was using a few years. In early 2018, I upgraded to a new Mac mini.
Somewhere in this time, iPhoto became Photos.

And then one day, I noticed one series of photos from a single trip I took were missing. Just missing. The photos before that, and after that, were there.

I've been looking a few years now. I've even paid someone to try and do data recovery on some external HDs that MIGHT have had one of my old Time Machine backups (which I started to delete as they accumulated - before I realized I was missing some pictures).

My question is:

Can anyone advise where the source files MIGHT be stored. I've look in the "Pictures" section in Finder, I don't see anything. I do seem to recall back in the olden days being able to look "under to hood" so to speak and look at source files.

Any suggestions? Or do I just need to let this go?

Lastly, does anyone know how pictures could have simply vanished? My guess is somehow when transferring from iPhoto to Photos something happened. Since these were from March 2014, I'm not exactly sure when they vanished. I just know I realized they were gone about 2.5 years ago and I've looked everywhere, even spent some seriously money trying to recover old HDs that had been deleted (but not written over).

It's valuable pictures of some of my first days with my wife, they have a lot of sentimental value.
 

usagora

macrumors 601
Nov 17, 2017
4,869
4,451
Can anyone advise where the source files MIGHT be stored. I've look in the "Pictures" section in Finder, I don't see anything. I do seem to recall back in the olden days being able to look "under to hood" so to speak and look at source files.

You can do this by going to:

~/Pictures/Photos Library.photoslibrary

right-click that file and then left-click on "Show Package Contents"

You will then see the "originals" folder. I sure hope you find them there, but it sounds like at some point you may have inadvertently trashed those photos (and the trash automatically empties/permanently deletes after 30 days).
 
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