I spent a good part of the day yesterday troubleshooting a stubborn Aperture issue for which I found very little online documentation. I thought I’d share my experience here with hopes that any other users with a similar issue might find it helpful. Technical information: I’m using Aperture 1.5.6 on Mac OS X 10.5.1.

It all started when I returned home from a Christmas day hike around the city with my camera. I put my CF card in my card reader and selected the images to import into Aperture. When I clicked Import, I was greeted with this lovely error message:

I clicked “Continue Importing” but the same error returned recursively for each photo I tried to import. Weird, I thought. I had just imported photos from the same card the day before. My first thought was that the CF card’s directory must be corrupt. I fired up my copy of Lexar Image Rescue but luckily I got distracted and didn’t get around to using it before I had to run to the office for a while. I say “luckily” because I ended up bringing the CF card with me and trying it on my Mac at work. And the photos imported with no problem. So this ruled out card corruption and pointed toward a hardware or software problem with my Mac at home. My gut told me it was likely a software problem, as my machine had no other symptoms of hardware issues and my other USB and Firewire devices were functioning normally.

So I started doing a little digging. In my experience, one of the best ways to troubleshoot a new technical issue is with Google: I Googled “ICA download error” and found this thread and this thread at Apple Discussions detailing similar issues. Both threads were helpful, but neither discussed an issue exactly like mine, and neither offered a solution that worked. Just to cover my bases, I did a permissions repair and a disk repair on my hard drive, but neither helped.

When I got back to my Mac at home, I reformatted the CF card in my camera (just to be thorough) and shot a few test photos on the newly formatted card. I put the card in my reader and tested it once more in Aperture. Same ICA Download Error. So I fired up Image Capture to see if it yielded any different results. And it did: I was able to import the photos from the card to my Desktop. I went back into Aperture, thinking it would be a good idea to test photo import from my hard drive instead of off the card, however I got the same error message. But now that the photos were on my Desktop I was able to test importing them choosing the “In their current location” option. It worked! Aperture imported the photos and left the masters on my Desktop.

At this point, I was pretty sure that the issue was related to my import destination: I had been attempting to import the photos as referenced images to a folder called “Aperture Referenced Images” and my import options specify that new subfolders get created in this folder. I tried relocating the master images from my Desktop to the same subfolder of “Aperture Referenced Images” that I had been attempting to import to previously (the folder was named “Test Import”). This time, Aperture treated me to a different error message:

And this error message gave me the clue I had been looking for: it was a permissions issue after all. I navigated to my “Test Import” folder and checked its permissions with a Get Info. The folder was owned by System with others ownership set to Read Only. I double-checked some of my other project folders, and they were all owned by Charlie (aka me).

When I attempted to change the ownership of this folder, the Finder crashed. So I moved the masters from it, deleted it and recreated a new project in Aperture. When I tested importing again, everything went smoothly and my masters imported to the folder and were referenced in Aperture.

How did the “Test Import” folder’s permissions get changed? I have no clue. And in hindsight, if I had tested importing to a different project or to a different location on my hard drive, I may have solved this issue sooner. But I enjoy the troubleshooting process, and it was satisfying to nail down the cause of this particular problem. If other Aperture users out there are experiencing similar issues, I encourage you to share your experiences in the comments, or at the Apple Discussions site.