Posted the following on the Family Facebook Page. At best, someone may help. At worst, they should appreciate how I have suffered.
Hey, all. In going through digital photos preparing to make prints and a slide show for Mom's party, I discovered that the Operating System upgrade lost some pictures from my iPhoto Library. Thanks to my excellent tech having installed the latest version of iPhoto before the execrable upgrade to Photos, it lost only some of my pictures rather than dumping the entire library as did happen to many users.
Some of the pictures definitely taken on my camera and probably on my phone were from a four-year period (roughly the same time Donald lived with us), during which my ONLY copies were on iPhoto, which I foolishly trusted and so did not make CDs nor save memory sticks for those years. I know how many images are missing from certain events only because I made Facebook albums of those events and can compare number of images in those albums to number left in iPhoto.
No attempts restored the missing images, so I have arranged to bring an external hard drive which I have, but am deathly afraid to turn on myself, to my tech so he can duplicate the drive, then rebuild a library using whatever remains on there plus images I have added to the other libraries since.
I will NEVER, EVER trust an Apple Photo App again! My tech suggests Adobe Lightroom, a paid program, but the cost is small and it's worth much more never to have to undergo this torture again! Meanwhile as you may have guessed, not too many scans are getting done.
Another thing I was attempting to do was tag all images containing a reasonably flattering likeness of at least one family member to share on the Cloud where those wishing to share images could do so without having to email them to me. The Photos App, which I won't use on principal anyway, is as useless for that as are Facebook albums, as both contain reduced quality images no good to print. For those of you wishing to send scans, it will have to be by email until I work something out. My tech recommends the following resolutions. Please scan these size images at these resolutions.
Printing quality = 200ppi
ORIGINAL > Scan @PPI = Output resulting 8x10 print
2x3 wallet > scan 800ppi
4x6-5x7 > scan 400ppi
8x10 > scan 200ppi
Slides/Negs > scan 1600ppi
Right now all I can promise is the party will feature some pictures. How many in what format I don't know. When I go to meet my tech I will stop and buy some large frames of the same kind in which I have done photo tributes before, so unless something breaks down either here or at the drug store I should at least have those. As for a slide show, if I get Adobe Lightroom and it has a great way for easily putting together a slide show, fine. If it even STARTS WITH ME, TO COMMENCE TO ATTEMPT TO TORTURE ME in the way that iPhoto and Photos have, ALL BETS ARE OFF! Anyone reading this with experience making digital slide shows who is willing to attempt to put one together, let me know and I can email you pictures--I refuse to kill myself over this! If no one wants to or can, hey, I tried. As for some way to project said show, it may come to transporting our own personal TV to the place which will require major help!
I still do want to build a digital database of all my pictures along with as many other important images (such as family pictures) as possible, so I haven't given up on that--just saying the less anyone expects miracles in the week left before the party, the less they will be disappointed.