Monday, May 18, 2015

Updating iPhoto for Mac OS X 10.10.3

Brian Webster (tweet):

Certain versions of OS X enforce a minimum version of iPhoto that must be installed, and will refuse to run older versions. If this is the case, then trying to open libraries or perform other operations with iPhoto Library Manager will likely result in an error message saying that the installed version of iPhoto is not compatible.

Normally, it would be a simple matter of updating your version of iPhoto via the Mac App Store, but since Apple’s release of their new Photos app, iPhoto is now no longer available on the app store, which makes it impossible to directly update older versions of iPhoto. It is still possible for most Macs to get the latest version of iPhoto, but it now requires jumping through some hoops.

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I've been able to run iPhoto 09 (8.1.2) on 10.10.3 by copying over iLifeSlideshow.framework from an older Mac to /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks and then running the iPhoto executable from the command-line. It's not the most user-friendly experience, but it does seem to work ok.

I can appreciate Apple not wanting to support older iPhoto versions, but they could at least let you run them after clicking away an "this is unsupported" dialog rather than just prohibiting it.

> which makes it impossible to directly update older versions of iPhoto

I used 'iPhoto Library Upgrader' from Apple (https://support.apple.com/kb/DL1523?locale=en_US) and it did the trick for my iPhoto 6 library.

@charles Thanks for the link. It never would have occurred to me to look for something like that. Wonder why they didn’t just build it into Photos.

@michael I really just stumbled on this, not sure how, likely some lucky Google search, about two weeks ago. I also don't understand why they can't just make that part of Photos.

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