Fixing the iPhoto 7 Export Bug

iPhoto 7, part of the new iLife 08 suite, has some great new features, including the much-touted "events" categorization instead of "rolls," a better levels slider and a new "reduce noise" slider that clears up fuzz (and in the extreme can make your friends look like digital cartoons - nice).

The upgrade is not without its faults, however, and even the most simple of operations – exporting a photo – didn't seem to work. No dialogue box, no options, zilch. Frustrated users with doomsday declarations of iPhoto 7 have posted to the Apple discussions and Macrumours forum about this. A quick search of these yielded the solution from Silver Mac.

The culprit?

Broken plug-ins. It's not iPhoto 7 at all, but the compatibility of third-party plug-ins.  The most common problem seems to come from the Flickr exporter, but when that didn't work, a lot of trial and error removing plug-ins from my iPhoto contents revealed other problematic ones. To aid other users in the removal of the broken plug-ins, I've come up with the following list of plug-ins that are incompatible with iPhoto 7:

• EasyShareExporter
• Facebook
• FlickrExport
• FileExporter (but do keep FileExporter2)
• iPhoto2Gallery
• iPhoto2Gmail
• Picasa
• Shutterfly

Please feel free to add any others in the comments. iPhoto was up and running with full exporting capacity after I removed the FileExporter and FlickrExport plug-ins. If you are still unable to export, try carefully removing others one at a time.

If you were enjoying these plug-ins, fear not: MacUpdate already has a version of the Flickr exporter that is iPhoto 7-compatible. More are sure to come.