I have missing masters - question posted after twitter mention…
I had 25,000 referenced masters in a directory next to the aperture library and ran consolidate (thought it was successful) but now I see 1012 “Missing” Masters. When I do “Locate Referenced Files” Aperture says I do not have any referenced files. But if I go do a Finder search for files in the old referenced location they are all still out there - (and not in the Aperture Library Masters) (They all have the “Arrow/Triangle/exclamation mark” badge)
So my question is - can I connect the “Missing” to the existing file? Or do I have to delete all the “missing masters” and loose all the aperture metadata I have on them?
“Locate Referenced Files” is not an option as it says they are not referenced files.
* if I run “Relocate” on the files I get this error:
“Unavailable master files cannot be relocated.
The selected master image is either offline or not found. Please reconnect it and try again.”
Any advice or help from the community would be very appreciated - this is my first post - hope it was intelligible
(living in a cave like you do)
John P.
Multiple, Mac OS X (10.7.2), iMac, MacBook Pro, PowerBook.
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missing masters "Unavailable master files cannot be relocated."
#1
John,
Thanks for posting the details here. Much easier than on twitter :)
Sounds like a database error. Have you tried repairing or rebuilding yet? Hold down command-option on launch and choose “repair database”. It’ll take a while if you have a really big library.
Before you do that though, I’m curious… since there’s a curved arrow on the thumbnails, that means Aperture in some form does recognize them as referenced. You said that Locate Referenced Files is not an option; does that mean you’re selecting just the photo(s) that are problematic before trying to run that command, or are you selecting your entire library? It’s also worth trying to right-click on a single photo and choosing the Locate command (it’s near the top of the pop-up menu).
Anyway assuming that doesn’t work, then yes I’d try the repair and possibly even the rebuild of the database.
Finally, if you do have to reimport them, you can always lift/stamp all metadata and adjustments, so all is not lost. Of course if you’re talking about thousands of photos this isn’t ideal, but if it’s just a few, it might be easier to just do that anyway.
@PhotoJoseph
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I did all three repair options before posting - so that’s covered.
yes to your question - I did try one image or all the missing or all the library - same result.
Not sure how to post an image here but I have screen shots of files that have little yellow triangles with a bang - but no masters - so if I try to relocate unavailable and if I try to locate - it says they are not referenced
kind of a catch 22…
- Help me help you.
John,
You can’t embed a screenshot here unfortunately, but if you can host it and link to it, that’s fine. Or use the Drop Box under the More menu above to show me something. Although I’m not sure that I need to see it.
Here’s another thing to try… option-drag a few of those problem images into a new project (option-drag to make a copy) and then export that project as a new Library. Open that Library and try to reconnect. If it still doesn’t, create yet another new, empty Library, then import the just-exported test library into that.
There’s a database rewrite process that seems to happen when importing, and who knows, maybe that’ll fix this. I’ve seen that fix some pretty bizarre things before.
@PhotoJoseph
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