Constantly Rebuilding Thumbnails Issue with Aperture 3.4.x
I’ve had at least two readers reporting a problem a thumbnail rebuild issue. If this sounds like something you’re running into, please try the solution below and let us know in the comments if it did or didn’t help — or if you have any kind of related problem.
Symptom
On every launch, Aperture starts rebuilding thumbnails (even though it doesn’t appear to need to). If you stop the rebuild, all is fine, but it will start up again on next launch. Odds are it’s always starting with the same number of images to rebuild; i.e. you see 78,415 thumbnails rebuilding, and you have 120,000 image in your library. So it’s likely not all of them, but most of them. Or more accurately, a single bad apple that’s ruining the batch.
Treatment
You may have tried repairing permissions, repairing and rebuilding the database… trashing preferences… repairing hard drive… reinstalling Aperture… and more, all to no avail. You’ve tried manually rebuilding the thumbs, letting it complete, but it still starts over on next launch. Ugh!
Cure
Well, this worked for one customer — hopefully it will work for you, too.
What ultimately worked for one customer was to Consolidate Originals on the entire library — this means copying all referenced photos into the library, making it managed. At that point, the problem disappeared. In the process of consolidating, a small handful of images turned out not to be found, even though prior to this Aperture was reporting no offline or missing photos. Fortunately those few missing originals were not of importance, and the customer deleted them from his library.
Side note: I’ve noticed before that when you Consolidate or Relocate Originals, sometimes Aperture will identify missing Originals that it otherwise hadn’t noticed. It seems that this is the most thorough method to analyze the connection to your Originals, which makes sense — Aperture can’t move them if it can’t find them — and so is a sure-fire way to identify any missing or broken connections.
Once this consolidation was complete, the customer was able to Relocate Originals again to another location, and the problem stayed gone.
Therefore, I’m of the mind that simply Relocating Originals will have the same effect, and would certainly be easier and faster to perform. You could probably even do it to the same drive — just relocate from one folder to another, which would be very fast. You will still need sufficient free space for this though; I believe Aperture won’t even start unless it sees more than the space it needs for the entire relocate, even though it ultimately won’t need any more space than it started with.
If you do need to Consolidate to make the problem go away, you may be needing a very big disk with lots of free space. Fortunately external hard drives are cheap right now
Again, let us know if you have this problem, and if this fixes it, in the comments!
Comments
on November 28, 2012 - 1:38pm
I had the same problem. I turned off Faces and the problem went away.
on November 28, 2012 - 6:28pm
Hmm, even though I don’t suffer from this particular problem, I had a problem with aperture telling me now and then I had some referenced images it could not find. I just now tried the ‘consolidate library’ thing, and it is importing a whole bunch of images into the library, even though I have never used referenced libraries. I wonder if the ‘consolidate’ function could solve other problems I am seeing, as it will do some things to the database, which might cause some of my problems (hanging aperture on close, never finishing vault backups etc).
on November 29, 2012 - 5:21am
Dan,
For what it’s worth, the user described above did not have Faces enabled. I wish the solution had been that easy!
Gert-Jan,
Do you know what it imported? Sounds like maybe once or twice on import you accidentally had it set to put the images somewhere other than in the Aperture library.
@PhotoJoseph
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on November 29, 2012 - 7:33am
As a disclaimer, I am a fairly new user of Aperture. I have been having the issue of thumbnails being generated every time I open Aperture. I selected Consolidate Originals and then selected copy. I got the message “No Referenced Files. The selection doesn’t have any referenced files.” So, then I selected Relocate Originals and moved them to my external hard drive. I closed Aperture and reopened and, unfortunately, it started generating the thumbnails again. Perhaps I’m not doing something correctly in following your solution.
Part 2 - I decided to try to Consolidate Originals again and now it is copying the files. I will let you know if that solves the problem.
Patti P.
on November 29, 2012 - 8:04am
Update to previous comment: It finished Consolidating Originals (copy) and then I closed Aperture and restarted my computer. When I opened Aperture, I thought it might have worked, but then it started generating the thumbnails again!
Patti P.
on November 29, 2012 - 9:20am
Patti,
There could be two issues at play here, assuming of course that the root problem is the same.
First since it didn’t want to consolidate at first, there are probably other database issues. Also you may not have actually consolidated all files, or if most were already consolidated, then perhaps you have the same issue but in reverse and need to move all images to a referenced location (as I mentioned above, I suspect that the act of moving them is what’s needed, not actually bringing them into or sending them out of the library).
Anyway step one is to see if in fact all image have been consolidated. Create a Smart Album for the entire library and set it to show offline or referenced or missing images. I there are any, consolidate those if you have the masters, or delete them if you do not.
If you haven’t yet, now would be a good time to do a library repair. Check the FAQ for instructions if you aren’t familiar with that.
Once you are confident that all images are managed (consolidated), relaunch and see what happens. If you get the thumbs rebuild again, do let it finish once (or even better, select ALL photos and manually trigger a rebuild). Relaunch once complete and if that doesn’t solve it, then it’s time to go the other way — relocate all original to another location outside of the library and see what happens.
Disclaimer: you should of course be working with a duplicate, or at least have a solid backup, of your library before doing all this messing around.
@PhotoJoseph
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on November 29, 2012 - 12:48pm
I read your FAQ about repairing or rebuilding an Aperture library. I selected Repair Database and, when it was finished and Aperture launched, the thumbnails didn’t start generating. I closed Aperture and opened it again and so far it isn’t generating thumbnails! Thanks so much for your help!!! I will let you know if the issue arises again … keeping my fingers crossed that this is the end of it!
Patti P.
on December 6, 2012 - 3:21pm
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on October 28, 2013 - 6:41am
I erased my hard drive and restored from Time Machine when I updated to Mavericks and Aperture 3.5. I noticed on the first few launches of Aperture, it rebuilt all thumbnails, or at least gave that impression by counting down from the 15,000 images I have.
Like many, a large portion of my library is referenced. Like anyone here, I noticed it kept happening, but this weekend while I was at home, I noticed it was not only happening again, but happening VERY SLOWLY. I noticed that this time, unlike the others, I actually had the network volume which contains my originals mounted.
So, my theory:
If your originals are not available (external or network drive not connected), it looks like it’s rebuilding your thumbnails/previews, but it’s not. It’s just racing through them, noticing the original is not available, and thus, when you launch Aperture, the next time, it does it again.
This would also explain why the above solution seems to work, as it finally makes the user ensure they are connected to their original volume. So, I let it complete the preview rebuild with that network volume connected, which took a very long time (I was only on Wi-Fi), and every time I’ve launched Aperture since, no rebuild!
YMMV :)