Most of us import photos from our digital cameras directly into iPhoto (or some other photo editor) on our Macs. But some people prefer to use Image Capture instead (perhaps because they have that app running all the time anyway) to import their images, then save them to iPhoto from there. But one Hints reader ran into a problem using that workflow: Before importing the photos, he selected the Image Capture option to delete the photos from the camera after the import was complete. But when the import was finished, the photos weren’t in iPhoto. He couldn’t re-import them because, as he’d specified, they had already been deleted from the camera.
But they weren’t completely lost. The reader did some digging and found the missing images in the folder /Private/tmp/Image Capture_Import.XXXXXXXX/ (the X’s are a sequence of digits and numbers that likely changes with each import). He recovered them from there and was able to complete the import. One of his fellow readers suggested that he could avoid that problem in the future by deleting imported photos on the camera itself, not by using software on his Mac.