Q. Help! All my photos have disappeared since I installed iLife and I cannot find them in iPhoto. If I search for them nothing shows up.

A. Your photos are probably safe and sound. As mentioned in a previous article, Apple has changed the way that photos or .jpg files are stored in iPhoto. iPhoto consists of a data base, and a series of folders. iPhoto will automatically import your images, sort them by date and store information about them. You can then add information and edit a version of the files.

In the past, Apple created a folder called “iPhoto Library” inside your Photos folder. That folder contained all the information and files that iPhoto needs to function. To protect the files, Apple changed the folder format into a “package” – which is a special folder that appears to be a single file called “iPhoto Library” in your Photos folder. If you right click or hold down the Control key and click the file with the mouse, you can choose “Show Package Contents” and you will reveal the hidden folders and files.

If you search for a file called “iPhoto Library” you will probably find two files one in your Photos folder – which the iPhoto app created the last time you opened it – and you will find an older, larger “iPhoto Library” file another location. It was probably moved by misadventure or accident. You can verify this by “Showing Package Contents” on the older file. Rename the newer file – or it will be overwritten -put the older file back in place, in Photos, and reopen iPhoto – your images are restored. By the way if you are running Leopard, you will be able to search for your files inside iPhoto Library package without opening it.

Q. I am having trouble with Time Capsule and I don’t think that it is backing up. I get an error saying that the back up disk image could not be mounted. How can I fix this?

A. Time Capsule, as you may know, is an additional tool to help users back up their Macintoshes wirelessly over a local network. Users running Mac OS X 10.5 aka Leopard, can take advantage of the new easy to use back up feature Time Machine. That way they can protect their valuable data in case some disaster strickes their computer.

Time Machine and Time Capsule will back up data every hour that the Macintosh computer is up and running. Initially it does a complete backup and then in tracks and backs up any changed files. With the back you can recover a file or the entire computer’s system and data if either is lost somehow.

Some users have experienced similar problems with the initial versions of the Time Machine. For every Mac that it backs up it creates an image of the hard drive in the form of a sparse disk image. A disk image is a file that behaves like a removable hard drive and a sparse one doesn’t have a fixed size so it can grow as required. For some reason, the sparse image may get damaged – afterwards it may not be able to mount normally, so that it can be read from or written to.

The fix for this is simple. Your Time Capsule should appear in the Finder’s Side Bar. Open a new Finder window if one is not open. If you don’t see the sidebar click the white lozenge in the top right corner of the window. Open the Time Capsule’s drive where you will see one or more “sparsebundle” files. Look for the one that matches your computer’s name along with a jumble of letters and numbers. My computer’s Time Machine file is named “macbook_001b639842a7.sparsebundle”. The jumble represents you “Ethernet Address”, which you can find under Network in System Preferences.

To fix the problem – simply rename the file by changing a few letters or numbers. The next time that the Time Capsule backs your Mac up it will see the file is missing and it will create a new one. After a few days of successful back up you can delete the older back up file.