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Every couple months, I create a new project in iMovie. Today I opened it and it asked if I want to import past projects into the updated iMovie, so I clicked yes. The result is that 90% of the projects just do not exist in iMovie anymore. Where did they go? How can I recover them?
MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 10.13
All iMovie projects are located in the iMovie library in which they were created and saved, or moved to. You can have as many iMovie libraries as you want. When you update iMovie, as I recall, it opens in a new blank library. You can close iMovie and go to the Movies folder (Go/Home/Movies and the icons of all iMovie libraries that you have will be listed there, unless you moved it somewhere else. Double click on any library icon and iMovie will open in that library.
I am guessing that your projects are contained in more than one library, so go to your Movies folder and see what libraries that you have and what projects are in them. You can save a project to any library that you want. You cannot combine iMovie libraries, although you can move projects from one library to another.
-- Rich
-- Rich
All iMovie projects are located in the iMovie library in which they were created and saved, or moved to. You can have as many iMovie libraries as you want. When you update iMovie, as I recall, it opens in a new blank library. You can close iMovie and go to the Movies folder (Go/Home/Movies and the icons of all iMovie libraries that you have will be listed there, unless you moved it somewhere else. Double click on any library icon and iMovie will open in that library.
I am guessing that your projects are contained in more than one library, so go to your Movies folder and see what libraries that you have and what projects are in them. You can save a project to any library that you want. You cannot combine iMovie libraries, although you can move projects from one library to another.
-- Rich
-- Rich
Using Spotlight to search for iMovie, I found "iMovie Library 1" (58MB, creation date of today), and "iMovie Library" (36GB, creation date of 2015).
The 36GB one seemed like the right one since its so huge. So I opened it. Then iMovie seemed to import it, and I was able to see most of the missing projects in iMovie. I can't tell if they are all recovered.
The 36GB "iMovie Library" file is now a 29GB file for some reason. I did not do anything in iMovie that would reduce the file size. I only opened some projects to see if they were openable.
What is going on?
I do regular Time Machine backups by the way, so that should help.
Also, when I try to create a new project, it asks which library I want to save it in. Which am I supposed to choose? Can't I combine them somehow? There should only be one library.
iMovie is missing 90% of my movies
