Aperture has a couple of built-in recovery methods - hold down Option/Alt and Command when launching Aperture and you’ll have the option of running a consistency check on permissions within the library package, or rebuilding the database from scratch via all the XML files in the Library package.

A lot of the time, when you get problems within Aperture, a rebuild will fix it. If rebuilding, deleting the preferences and deleting ~Library/Application Support/Aperture* still doesn’t fix the problems with a particular Library, there are some last-ditch things you can do.

First, we need to know a little about the ‘physical’ structure of the Library. The Library is a package - a folder that the Finder and most other applications treat as a single file. To look inside it, select it in the Finder, Right/Control-click on it and choose ‘Show Package Content’. You will then see a new Finder window showing lots of files (and more packages). Do NOT mess around with any of these files if you have ANY alternative! Doing so can permanently mess up that Library - you have been warned...

Anyway, we have this new window open, and you will soon notice that all your Projects seem to be listed, with ‘.approject’ added to the end of the name. That’s because each Project that you see in Aperture exists as a separate package inside the Library - these packages are also the same as you get when exporting Projects from within Aperture, and can therefore be imported into another Library. There are a number of things we can do from here:

Recover Masters - hit Command-F to bring up a Spotlight search, then limit it to the current window. Do a search for Kind:Images and you will get a list of all the image files in the entire Library - note that this will include all the JPEG Previews, so you need to be a bit picky when copying the files out.

Recover Masters 2 - you can do the same for an individual Project by showing the contents of the package in the same way as we did for the Library, then searching just within that window.

Recover a Project - simply copy the Project out of the Library package and then import it into another Library. If you have a Library that continually fails to rebuild, this is one way of finding out which Project is causing the problems.

Library into Folder - select the Library in the Finder, bring up the info window and remove ‘.aplibrary’ from the end of the file name. The Library will magically become a regular folder that you can navigate without the right-clicking. Especially useful when trying to import multiple Projects into a new Library.
In theory it’s possible to go the other way as well but it’s more tricky and beyond the scope of this article...

Recover one Project from a Vault - Vaults are themselves packages, containing the entire Library package - so you can copy out individual Projects or even Masters in exactly the same way as you can from broken Libraries.

Just to repeat, these are methods or last resort after everything else has failed, but they can sometimes get you out of a hole. No warrantee is implied or given for these tricks... ;-)

Ian

*Note that this folder holds all your watermarks, keyword lists, auto-complete lists, presets, custom book layouts, custom keyboard shortcuts and a few more things - deleting it can lead to a lot of work getting things set up how they were before...