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A Few Troubleshooting Updates
An update on two troubleshooting-themed posts from the last few weeks:
First, a strange bug that popped up after the erase and install I performed last week. Everything went fairly smoothly, however there are always surprises when you do a complete reinstall of Mac OS X. The most significant of these that relates to Aperture is that all of my referenced images were offline when I fired Aperture up for the first time after the reinstall. This struck me as odd, because the path to the referenced images was exactly the same after my reinstall as it was before it. The volume name of my startup disk didn't change from the default (and kind of boring) Macintosh HD. (Note to self: name your hard drive something more exciting.)
My entire library of images showed up as offline, so I did a select all from the All Images view and chose File > Manage Referenced Files. I selected an image at random and navigated to its correct file path in the bottom half of the window. I clicked the Reconnect All button and Aperture corrected the links to my entire library, bringing all the images back online. Not bad. If any readers of this site have ever used Final Cut Pro's Media Manager to try and fix disconnected media, you'll know that Aperture's implementation of this tool is heads above Final Cut's.
Second, an update on the ICA download error I was experiencing a few weeks ago when attempting to import images into my library. I ultimately discovered that the issue was related to permissions on the destination folder I was trying to import into. After hearing from some of you that you were wrestling with similar issues, it seems like the issue is possibly related to Mac OS X 10.5.1. A few of you also reported experiencing the issue when attempting to import images directly into your library as managed images. The best advice I can offer in this case is to change the destination of your images on import — in other words, try importing images as referenced to a folder that you define in the import dialog and see if it fixes the issue. Unfortunately, this is a work around that may force users to modify their workflow so my hope is that this is a bug that will be resolved in a Mac OS X update or a future Aperture update.
Comments (6)
Charlie:
Now that you mention the problem with the referenced files, it happened to me about a month ago that something just made my external hard drive unrecognizable to the point that I panicked (as you may understand).
I wanted to discard a physical damage so I ran my Diskwarrior and apparently fixed it.
The point is that after fixing the disc, Aperture was unable to recognize the references for the images, just like if the drive had be re-named. The name and the directories were the same, but Aperture was not identifying any link at all.
As you did, I solved the problem by “reconnecting” ALL my collection, which –at last- solved the problem.
I can’t understand what happened to my Hard Drive that date, neither the cause of Aperture’s weird management of referenced images.
Every disk and partition that you connect to your computer has a unique ID above and beyond the volume name, and this UUID changes when you reformat the disk.
Aperture stores that disk UUID as well as the name of the volume so that it can cope with identically-named HDs. So it's looking at more than the filepath...
Ian
Ian, that makes sense. Thanks for the tip.
You could always name your HD something fun. For instance, while my two internals on my are still named Macintosh HD and Macintosh HD250, my external is named "Brobdingnagian Boot." Is that enough whimsy for you?
One of the problems that began after installing Leopard and the current version of Aperture is that periodically, my Referenced Images become disconnected. When I attempt to reconnect them, it shows my boot drive on which the masters reside as being off line. The only way to correct this is by closing and re-opening Aperture. This problem has been documented by numerous other users.
One of the problems that began after installing Leopard and the current version of Aperture is that periodically, my Referenced Images become disconnected. When I attempt to reconnect them, it shows my boot drive on which the masters reside as being off line. The only way to correct this is by closing and re-opening Aperture. This problem has been documented by numerous other users.