I recently tried to export all the masters from my aperture library to a hard drive as I needed to free up space. Unfortunately I suffered a power drop out about half way through. The master folder inside the aperture library when restarted was empty, only 50% had been exported to the hard drive.
Luckily I had the entire archive of masters backed up on another hard drive (backed up manually) but with the exact same folder names/project names filenames etc…
On the 50% of preview that didn't get relocated, there is a little black exclamation mark inside a yellow triangle. When I try to relocate reference files its says there isn't any. I guess this is right as they were never referenced in the first place.
But is there any way I can point the previews/aperture library to the manually backed up files so I don't have to reimport 50% of the files from scratch. There will be about 40,000 pictures in about 300-400 projects, most with adjustments. Im terrified there isn't. Its a LOT of work if not :-(
If anyone has any ideas it would be very much appreciated!
Vinny,
OK so that means Aperture thought those images were still managed, but somehow they are NOT managed anymore. However you DO have the Originals from a backup.
Going back to your original post, you said that you had backed up the Originals manually, with the “exact same folder names/project names filenames etc.”. Does this mean that you had opened the Library package and copied out the Originals? If not, I’m not sure I follow how you had a manual backup of Originals of a Managed Library. Maybe you simply made a copy of every Original on import?
If you somehow did copy them from the Package, perhaps putting them back in the same place would help.
If not, we need to figure out what file to delete that holds the path to the file, so it sees every single image as offline and needs to reconnect. At least that’s my thinking right now…
@PhotoJoseph
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Hi Joseph,
Yes you are right I think I have mislead you a little. What I meant to say was the project names inside Aperture corresponds to the folders I have backed up. Filenames etc are also exactly the same. I did not back up from inside the package contents so just putting them all back as you rightly state would be futile.
You mention the idea of finding a ‘file’ to delete so they all appear offline and need reconnecting how do I go about doing this?
Vinny,
I don’t know, but I’m going to try to find out.
Answer another question for me please… have you opened the current Library package to determine if there are Originals still in there, but simply disconnected? (It’s not really “simple”… but I want to know if this missing half of the Originals that didn’t successfully relocate are actually still there, but only the connection is broken).
-Joseph
@PhotoJoseph
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Hello Joseph,
I have checked the folder as the first port of call after this happened and they had all gone, why I do not know, but it was empty.
I really appreciate your time in trying to help me out here. So regardless of the outcome, I thank you!
Vinny,
Good thing you had that backup!
The command you’re looking for is “Locate Referenced Files” under the File menu. Select all the missing images (that’s what the yellow triangle means, and you can create a Smart Album to easily find all those images across your entire Library at once by setting it to File Status: Missing [screenshot]) and open the “Locate Referenced File” command. You’ll see reconnect options at the bottom and I think you’ll figure it out from there!
@PhotoJoseph
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Hi,
Thanks for the reply. I set up a smart folder as you suggested. This was really useful for getting only the missing files. When I select them all and ‘locate referenced files’ I still get the ‘the selection does not have any referenced files’ dialogue.
I can understand why its saying theyre not referenced as they never were. But if it knows they are missing then how I re connect the masters I cant figure out.