Wow, i wouldn’t have thought it would have been a preference file issue, good find though.

Glad that it is all sorted, my next move (if you hadn’t already tried), would have been a database repair.

I am having this same issue. I had it before but generating previews fixed the problem. Not so with a new album that I really need on my iPad. This process should be MUCH easier than it is. I have repaired the permissions within the database and removed the preferences file and still no luck with the new album showing up.

I can put images into existing albums but as I use my iPad as a portable portfolio it would be nice to have portraits separated from architectural or family photo work. Come on Apple

After much banging on my head and reading lots of forums and doing all that was stated above, I found my issue. I had some photos that were not processed with the newest RAW convertor and the iPad would not see albums made up of those images.

I guess I’ll set my machine to reprocessing my whole library tonight to avoid this issue in the future. Hope this helps someone.

I posted this over on the Apple Aperture discussion forum but I thought it might be useful to people here

I have gone through a lot of steps and they all seem to have inched me closer to resolving this issue. My original post may have been cluttered so I’ll list the steps I took here. The final step, though very time consuming seems to have corrected most of the problems, though I think I now need to get Aperture to generate new previews for all of my images at a size that the iPad likes (1920x1920).

1. Set Aperture’s preference to Always share with iLife applications
2. Set Aperture’s preference to generate previews at 1920x1920 or better
3. Repair Permissions via the Aperture Library First Aid function described here (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3805). You may want to do one of the more serious Library repairs just to get things organized with the file structure system but “Repair Permissions” seems to have been all I need to do.
4. Go to the top of your image hierarchy and reprocess all of the images with the newest Aperture RAW convertor by control-clicking on Photos and selecting “Reprocess Masters”(if you shoot RAW… and you should shoot RAW). It gives you several options, I chose to preserve all of my edits which will add additional time to the process but is worth it so you don’t have to re-edit everything. I selected “All Photos” and “Reprocess Existing Images”

If you have a large library (1TB or more) you are now two days or so into this process.

5. Back up your Vault to save these changes
6. Generate new previews since you changed the size in which Aperture saved the JPEGs it uses to export to Aperture. I believe this is done from the top of the image hierarchy as well by holding down the option key when you right-click on the whole library. But, I am not at this stage yet so I can’t be sure about that.
7. If you started on Monday then it is now Friday and time to have a beer.

Hi,

I am having no problem at all with smart albums showing up in iTunes.

If I run through my setup, then hopefully it might help you. First of all this is what I have setup for previews in the Preferences:

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Then in iTunes I have this setup on the iPad:

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Other things I would try if this still doesn’t work is a cleanup of the aperture database. If that does not work go to the aperture library view and go to photos, select all your photos and go to Photos > update Preview but before clicking on it press the alt key (options key) and it will change from update previews to generate previews.

Hope this helps, if not please let me know and I will see what else I can try and suggest.

Chris

I’ve had a long running issue wig iPad syncing ever since aperture was updated to 3.1. It manifested as albums not showing up in the source list on iTunes as available to sync under selected albums. In extreme cases, the entire library was unavailable. I narrowed down the issue to one point - during heavier loads, the aperture database.XML file inside the aperture library was not being updated frequently enough.

I tried everything from rebuilding, repairing, permissions, preference files, previews thumbnails, and even reimporting my entire 350 GB library. The last trick sort of did the trick, but the aperture data XML remains only updating in certain circumstances. My computer takes a minute or so to writethe file and interrupting it doing so can cause it to simply not update it.

My work around is this: I use aperture as normal, but when I am finally happy with the state of my library and I’m ready to sync, I move a project in and out of a folder. This causes aperture into kickstarting it’s update XML process. I monitor the process via activity monitor until it’s complete and double check the XML file has been updated.

Has kept me sane.

Thanks Joseph. I’m sure I’ve tried that. I believe the aperturedata.XML is recreated from scratch when certain events trigger it, and if so you kind of get a ‘fresh’ start anyway. I think so because when the XML gets corrupted, it OS a very small file with little info, and it just takes a rejigger to kick it back.

I did notice if I tried to do something else while aperture was reprocessing the file, it would sometimes stop and not update it (I think aperture does a lot of processing and prioritises it quite well otherwise). And ESPECIALLY if you lose aperture, it could just halt it leaving a premature file. I’m guessing aperture 3.1.3 may help in this regard as it’s mentione that more stable preview updating during quit is listed as a fix.

I remember my old library did not kick start the XML often enough, but reimporting my entire library into a new one was much better.

Chaps

For what it’s worth my routine for quitting aperture is to click on Activity Monitor in the dock; now Aperture sees that it is working in the background and gets on with stuff that it won’t do when you’re in the foreground. I don’t try to quit Aperture till it has crunched though that. If it’s taking more than a few seconds I go and do something else. But fingers crossed that 3.1.3 fixes it.

David

David,

As mentioned, that is also my strategy! Unless you mean you actively click on something else to make Aperture go into background. However, that does make sense - Aperture has some neat prioritisation algorithms, and maybe I have a hunch that when you’re fiddling with stuff in the foreground, the background processes can stall out.