Platform: macOS

Those of us that have iPads know that they are a fantastic way to show off your favorite photos, wether it’s to a potential client or to grandma over the holidays. The problem is, syncing your photos to your iPad can be a bit of a chore. We’ve gone through loads of different options and ways to do this, which gets especially complicated when managing multiple libraries, but I recently realized that there’s a much better solution to this.

I realize this is a tip that will be useful to very few of you, but I came across it today and thought I’d share. And even if you don’t have a camera that holds multiples cards, you may find some of the thinking here interesting.

I’ve had at least two readers reporting a problem a thumbnail rebuild issue. If this sounds like something you’re running into, please try the solution below and let us know in the comments if it did or didn’t help — or if you have any kind of related problem.

Symptom

On every launch, Aperture starts rebuilding thumbnails (even though it doesn’t appear to need to). If you stop the rebuild, all is fine, but it will start up again on next launch. Odds are it’s always starting with the same number of images to rebuild; i.e. you see 78,415 thumbnails rebuilding, and you have 120,000 image in your library. So it’s likely not all of them, but most of them. Or more accurately, a single bad apple that’s ruining the batch.

Treatment

You may have tried repairing permissions, repairing and rebuilding the database… trashing preferences… repairing hard drive… reinstalling Aperture… and more, all to no avail. You’ve tried manually rebuilding the thumbs, letting it complete, but it still starts over on next launch. Ugh!

Cure

Well, this worked for one customer — hopefully it will work for you, too.[more]