I have recently upgraded my 2008 vintage macbook pro to an iMac and used Time Machine to setup the new machine. All of the programs have just worked. I had not been actively taking pictures for at least couple of years, so I had not actively used Aperture for a long while. I had an Aperture 2 library that I had created in 2008.  At some time I upgraded to Aperture 3. When I upgraded, I made a backup of the original library.

All of the images in the library were all successfully imported from the camera. They were referenced and stores on an external disk (HFS+ formatted). The library was also stored on this drive. When I upgraded to Aperture 3, I noticed that one of my masters seemed to be corrupt with streaks through it. My fault, that I should have investigated this then. Others did not, but I was really looking at the preview jpg. That image would not open in preview either.

Fast forward to now, in checking out the new machine with the latest updates to Aperture, I see that hundreds of photos are now showing up as unsupported image format. Many of these images have been exported as JPGs. There was no hard drive crash,no bad memory card. I had not touched them in Aperture since their initial import where I added keywords, ratings and adjustments.   The pictures in question mostly came from my trusty Canon Rebel XTIand were in .CR2 format. However some came from the CD accompanying Rich Harrington’s Aperture 2 book in .NEF format.

Looking at the directories in the Finder, there is no preview for the affected images. I have copied the directories and tried to import into an eval Lightroom with no luck. 

Does anyone know what happened? Is Aperture safe to use? Are those Masters destroyed?

Thanks,

Jay