Jerry,

For some reason, Aperture has lost its connection to the master files. Fortunately that’s easy to fix. Presumably if you look at the icons on the thumbnail view, you see a little curved arrow with either a red line through it, or a yellow warning triangle?

Select the photos that are disconnected, and choose menu File > Locate Referenced Files…. This will open up a new window that allows you to reconnect missing files. In the top half, select one of the missing images, and in the bottom half, point to the master on your hard drive (if you don’t see a bottom half, look for a button that says “Show Reconnect Options”). Once a match is made, the buttons “Reconnect” and “Reconnect All” will become available. Click the “Reconnect All” and with any luck, it will reconnect ALL of your missing images.

There’s lots of ways to troubleshoot this if that doesn’t fix it, and I go into that in some depth in Tip #13 in the “ApertureExpert’s 15 Tips on File Management in Aperture 3” eBook, for future reference. But for now, let me know if this info helps solve the problem, and if not I’ll ask some more questions to get you back on track.

Jerry,

First thing’s first then… were you working Referenced or Managed? Referenced means that the master files (the files off the camera) were being stored OUTSIDE of the Aperture library; typically on an external hard drive (although it’s possible to put them on the same drive, but not likely). Managed means that Aperture was holding the files inside of the Library. This is the default setting, and on import, the option would be set to Store Files: In the Aperture Library.

Jerry,

When you’re in Browser (thumbnail) view, with Browser Metadata turned on (meaning you see your badges, ratings, keywords, etc. on the thumbnails; tap the U key to toggle that on and off), do you see any icons in the lower right corner of the image?

Refer to this post to see what I mean: Badges. Or, “What Are All Those Funny Icons, Anyway?”. Specifically I’m looking to see if you do or don’t have the icon listed as #5 on the thumbnails in question.

If you’re not sure, feel free to drop a screen shot into the Drop Box (under the More menu at the top of this page) for me to see.

Jerry,

That’s a relief. What I’m guessing happened then is that about four months ago, you (possibly inadvertently) changed the setting on import to go to an alternate location, and that’s where the imports have been going ever since. So now we just need to find that location!

Let’s put Spotlight to work. Select one of these files with the yellow triangle on it, and switch to the Metadata tab (on the left). If it’s not already, set the drop-down there to read “General”, which will show you a general collection of Metadata. Look for the one that says File Name. That is the name of the actual file, somewhere in the Finder.

Go ahead and select that File Name text and copy it to the clipboard, then open Spotlight (magnifying glass in the top right corner of your screen), and paste that text in. Hopefully it will find your missing file. Now, hold down the Command key on the keyboard when you select the file in that list; that will open its enclosing folder (instead of opening the file itself). Now you know where the file lives! You should see the rest of your missing images there, too.

Finally, go back to Aperture, and following the instructions I gave you in the beginning here, use the Locate Referenced Files tool to reconnect the masters.

Assuming we’re all well here, and you prefer to work Managed, we’ll get all those files back into the Library where you want them. But one step at a time here.

Jerry,

When you select a file and open the Referenced File Manager, it will list at the top where the last known location of the file was. Have a look there. Perhaps they are an on external HD?

Jerry,

I think… unfortunately… that they’ve been deleted. You just said that they were in the HD, but if you follow the structure (i.e. ~/Pictures/??) is the containing folder still there? Do you remember deleting any large chunk of “what are these” files?

At this point I’m really hoping that you’re running Time Machine there, and have a backup of your internal drive? Since they were on the internal, if you’re running Time Machine, you may be saved and able to recover.

Otherwise, if you think you just deleted them recently, then you can always try data recovery software.

Jerry,

How unfortunate, I am sorry to hear this.

I don’t have a preferred recovery app for deleted files. What’s your twitter name? I’ll ask on there, and you’ll probably get a few responses.

For now, stop using your Mac as much as possible. The more files you write and change on the HD, the less likely you’ll be able to recover the files that were deleted. Get into the Apple store asap, and please please please buy at least an external hard drive (even USB) to start using Time Machine. It’s such an easy backup system. If you can afford it, the Time Capsule is great because it’s wireless. But you can buy a 1TB USB drive for backup that’ll cost almost nothing.

Anyway let me know what your twitter name is and I’ll get the word out.