I’m having the same problem, and in fact my Apple TV screensaver started to look really weird when all of the versions started showing up from my various stacks.

I’m wondering if it may even be some odd design decision on Apple’s part – at least a temporary issue while they work on updating other pieces such as iTunes. There’s an Apple Support article at http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5221?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US which reads:

iTunes allows you to share photos and videos from your Aperture library with Apple devices. Unlike the other applications already discussed, iTunes shows all images in stacks, so the Share number shown when you choose Advanced > Choose Photos to Share may be may be higher if you have any stacked images in your Aperture library.

This of course refers to the image count as opposed to what is actually being synced, but I found it interesting nonetheless.

Fortunately, I’ve found what may be an acceptable workaround. Since iTunes actually only syncs the previews, simply selecting the other images in the stack and deleting their previews (right-click and choose “Delete Previews”) will prevent those images from being transferred to your iOS device or shown on the Apple TV. Obviously not a great solution if you want to keep previews around for some reason, but in my case I find that if an image is buried in a stack, I really don’t care about their previews anyway, which makes it a good way to save a little bit of disk space as well :)

Oh gawd I hope this wasn’t intentional by Apple. If so, it’s pretty much a deal breaker at this point.

Thanks for trying to help Joseph, it’s much appreciated, but personally, I’d rank this issue right up there above any other issue people have been complaining about with Aperture 3.3. Your solution may help some, but it’s a work-around requiring a lot of work and inefficiency, and would still end up with unintended redundancy… even worse since you could have duplicates on your iDevice that don’t even exist in Aperture. Again, it’s a good tip though that may help many others depending on their work flow.

I sure hope this gets straightened out soon because I need to decide whether I either can’t use Stacks, or can’t have clients reviewing work on iDevices. One of them must go in Aperture 3.3. I might try deleting Previews as a temporary solution.

I’m really surprised more people aren’t screaming bloody murder about this.

There is one other subtle but important point worth mentioning regarding Joseph’s solution that may affect some Apple TV users. When an album is updated in iPhoto or Aperture, iTunes is somehow notified of this automatically – sometimes it requires shutting down Aperture, sometimes it picks up the changes by itself within a few minutes.

However, when sharing from a set of folders, you end up having to reconfigure iTunes Photo Sharing (“Choose Photos to Share”) or shut down and restart iTunes before the changes will refresh on the Apple TV. Since I leave my computer and iTunes running all the time, this was a real problem for me, as new photos added to my folders (one of which was used as my screensaver) effectively never appeared on the Apple TV.

There’s actually a pretty fast way to delete non-stack-pick previews, although it will require regenerating ALL of the previews in a given album. Simply expand all stacks and select all images and choose “Delete Previews.” Once this finishes, clear your selection, collapse all stacks, and then select all again and choose “Generate Previews.” This will result in previews only being generated for the stack/album picks, since the other photos in each stack are hidden and therefore not selected.

Another possible workaround is to use Smart Albums. iTunes will still respect the “Include Stack Picks Only” option in a Smart Album, although if you have a lot of albums and projects that you’re syncing to your iPad, this could get very cumbersome.

So it turns out that even deleting previews doesn’t work reliably or consistently. It seems that iTunes is grabbing the masters/versions directly in at least some cases, but it’s extremely weird and inconsistent as to how it’s doing this.

I have an album that normally has 701 photos with all stacks collapsed. I tried deleting previews in several ways, ultimately falling back to turning off automatic preview generation for my entire library, going to Photos, doing a “Select All” and deleting ALL previews. iTunes (and the iLife Media Browser in other apps like Mail and Pages) now see 417 pictures in that same album. I have confirmed by going into the aplibrary file that no previews exist (the “Previews” folder still contains thumbnails, but the total size is 16MB – definitely not large enough to contain 417 previews).

Of the 701 pictures in the album in question, 20 are RAW+JPG, and removing the previews from those definitely removes them from any album views in the Media Browser or iTunes sync. However, this still leaves 264 JPG images that are not being rendered without their previews, despite the 417 that are.

As far as I can tell, the issue seems to be resolution dependent, but in a very strange way. Lower-resolution photos (generally 5MP or less) seem to be available even without their previews. However, higher resolution photos actually do appear, but only if they were shot in landscape orientation – all of the portrait shots from my iPhone 4S and higher-resolution cameras are excluded unless I specifically generate previews for them.

So I guess deleting previews is only a valid workaround if all of your stack photos are either RAW or were higher-resolution photos shot in portrait orientation. Go figure.

(and yes, I have done all of the standard library checking, repairing and rebuilding procedures. I even tested this with a brand new, empty Aperture library with the same results – it looks like Apple has put some logic in Aperture 3.3 to only rely on previews for higher-resolution photos, but has somehow messed up with height-width calculations).

Thanks Jesse. I’m glad I’m not the only one having problems with Previews. I came across your post here right after thoroughly testing this myself as a solution to the Stack Pick Sync bug. Here’s what I found:

Aperture 3.3 - The Previews mechanism appears to be entirely broken.
http://www.apertureexpert.com/forum-user/post/1866293

Yes, Aperture 3.2.4 definitely did not behave in this manner, as I previously used that to sync the exact same albums and projects to my various iOS devices and Apple TVs. It was only after upgrading to 3.3 that all of the images in my stacks began appearing.

I noticed the May 30th date as well, but it’s actually not uncommon for Apple to pre-write KB articles prior to the actual release of an update. Often the earlier dates aren’t even indicative of when the article actually appeared, merely when it was posted internally. For example, when iOS 5 came out in early October, several KB articles suddenly appeared on Apple’s support site on that day with September dates on them.

That said, I think iTunes might have at some point included images in stacks in merely in the item counts but not necessarily in the actual photos synced.

Specifically which KB are you referring to?

The timing of all of this is weird for me. I had gone through training and testing with Aperture 3.2.4 and then started importing from iPhoto, finishing just as Aperture 3.3 was released.

While I hadn’t synced much under 3.2.4, I had specifically tested syncing to see what happened with Stacks before deciding to jump in and migrate from iPhoto. Yes, to confirm Jesse’s comment, Aperture definitely handled Stacks and syncing correctly under 3.2.4.

The one I originally referenced in my post above: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5221

In fact, I’ve been syncing from Aperture to iTunes for years – pretty much since iTunes added Aperture support in the first place (Aperture 1.5, I think?), and I have never seen this Stacks behaviour in any prior version. As I noted, it’s possible iTunes might have included stacked photos in the counts displayed in the Photo sync options – I never paid much attention to those to be honest – but it has definitely never synced the non stack picks in any prior version.

I just booted up with an archived mirror drive that had Aperture 3.2.3 on it and tested it with another iPad. Yes, 3.2.3 most definitely handles Stacks and syncing correctly, only syncing the Pick of the Stack (regardless of whether or not the Stack is open or closed).

3.2.3 also handles Previews correctly, allowing me to delete Previews and verify the deletion by failure when dragging to the Desktop. When a Preview is generated, 3.2.3 will correctly match the Preview settings in Preferences for resolution (something also broken in 3.3).

Also in 3.2.3, photos only sync if there’s a Preview for them. If you delete the Preview, the photo won’t sync (stack or no stack) in 3.2.3.

The counts displayed in iTunes is correct, and the results are correct as well.

To recap what’s broken in Aperture 3.3:
- Syncing in iTunes copies all Versions in a Stack instead of just the Pick.
- Previews can’t always be deleted.
- Previews won’t adhere to the resolution set in Preferences.
- Since you can’t always delete a Preview, you can’t always filter syncing by Preview.
- Aperture will use the Original instead of a generated Preview based on the size set in Preferences, resulting in Originals being synced and exported when they should not be.

There are probably other implications of the impact of the above bugs.

If helpful, I could restore a Time Machine archive of 3.2.4 (I need to restore the full 750GB volume) and test 3.2.4, but this would be quite a bit of work. Additionally, I could screen grab all of this, or check anything else.

Good to hear that even the counts in iTunes were correct with prior versions of Aperture. This basically confirms that the Apple KB article is specific to Aperture 3.3.

As I posted in the other thread where we’re discussing the preview issue more specifically, however, it seems that the actual issue isn’t that previews can’t be deleted for certain images, but rather that they’re not created or used at all for those images. It seems that Aperture 3.3 is essentially using the original <u>as</u> the Preview in those cases.

In my case, the previews that are being generated are adhering to the resolution set in Preferences, but photos below a certain size are just using the originals directly as if they were previews, thereby also preserving their original resolution.

I have the same problem. Submitted a bug report to Apple here. Is anybody running Aperture 3.3 not experiencing this issue?

Thanks for this post! I was thinking it was me. I literally just migrated to Aperture from iPhoto less than an hour before Aperture 3.3 came out. The syncing of all versions didn’t happen prior to 3.3 did it?

I’ve been frustrated because there’s so much information about it only syncing the Pick from a Stack, but I’m guessing that’s only because 3.3 is so new.

This is a disaster!!!

Has Apple acknowledged this as a bug?

If it was up to me, I’d fix it so that it would sync based on the open/closed state of the Stacks in the albums you were syncing…or if that’s too hard, fix it so it just syncs the Pick.

Oh also, they need to enable Pick/Stack functionality in Faces.