MacBook downloading photos as thumbnails

Hi - I have a black MacBook, and unfortunately noticed this problem too late to save a number of my photos. The first few weeks I had the MacBook, everything worked as expected: I plugged in my camera, the photos were downloaded, and all was good with the world. I noticed later on that all of a sudden, the MacBook began downloading photos as thumbnails only - i.e., is bringing the photos in at 360 x 270 pixels. I didn't make any setting changes, so I can't imagine why this started happening. I also can't find any way to fix it. Does anyone know what is going on? Thanks. T.

 

iPhoto both imports the original photo, and then generates a small thumbnail for the photo so that it wouldn't take too long to load. I'm guessing you stumbled upon the thumbnail folder in iPhoto using Finder?

 

Thanks for answering.

I thought that must be it, too - that I had just come across the thumbnails, and the original full-size photos would be there. However, I've searched the system, and that is not the case - the only thing on my computer are thumbnails. I've done some test downloads with new photos, and the same thing happens - only thumbnails are stored on my computer. It's strange.

 

They're not in ~/Pictures/iPhoto/Originals/ ? Perhaps you have iPhoto set to not copy new photos into the iPhoto folder?