We recommended that you back up your 3rd party plug-in presets prior to the Aperture 3.4 upgrade, but of course many had already upgraded or never saw the notice. I don’t fully understand why, but I’ve been told it has something to do with “sandboxing” in how Aperture 3.4 (and Mountain Lion, perhaps?) handles 3rd party software or software that accesses other applications (i.e. plug-ins), but regardless, many many users have found that their presets were missing after the upgrade.

Fortunately, reader Patrick Curry shared how to recover Nik presets specifically, which he got from Nik tech support. I can verify this works, because I, erm, didn’t follow my own advice and upgraded without backing up!

To access the missing preset files follow this file path in your user folder: ~/Library/Preferences/Nik Software/(plug-in name)/User Presets. To access your Library folder, hold down the Option key while clicking the Go menu in the Finder.

Copy these presets to your desktop, open your Nik plug-in, click on the Import button, and select the copied presets.

Thanks Patrick!

If you’re having the same issue with other plug-ins, I recommend looking in the same place (Preferences), as well as in ~/Library/Application Support/ as you may find presets hiding in there as well.