All referenced photos have status 'Offline' when they certainly aren't

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Level 1

8 points

All referenced photos have status 'Offline' when they certainly aren't

Hi, has anyone had this error before? Aperture 3.0.2 shows that every photo in my whole library is offline, even though they are referenced files on my internal hard drive. This occurred after I upgraded to 10.5.3. I can manually 'Locate Referenced Files', though for 10,500 images this is slightly impractical!

When I go to the Locate Referenced Files dialogue, it shows my Macintosh HD as 'Offline', and pressing the 'Mount' button has no effect.

I've fixed permissions and repaired the HD in Disk Utility, and I've fixed permissions and repaired the Library in Aperture, with no results. Actually, after doing Repair Library, two of my Smart Albums have been duplicated, strangely.

Do you have any advice? This is serious as I can't edit any photos until they're located.

Thanks in advance.

MacBook Pro 2.53 GHz 4GB, iMac 2.16 GHz 2GB, Mac OS X (10.6.3)

Posted on Apr 5, 2010 4:11 AM

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Answer 1

Gary

Level 2

189 points

Apr 6, 2010 4:31 PM in response to andrew_cw

I can manually 'Locate Referenced Files', though for 10,500 images this is slightly impractical!

Hi Andrew - it's probably not nearly as bad as you think. I was recently in a similar-ish position, where I needed to relocate a bit over 5000 referenced images, spread through over 300 projects. I had cloned my referenced Photos archive from my iMac to my laptop and installed Aperture there too. Although the various file and folder hierarchies were the same, of course the UUID for the two hard disks were different and the masters were not linked. I initially located the referenced files on a project-by-project basis and found this worked. Synch up one file and the rest of the files in the project followed along.

I then discovered that I could do this at the top level of my Aperture hierarchy - a series of folders, one for each year. eg 2010, 2009, 2008, etc containing the various projects. Again, synch up one image file from the whole year and the rest automagically followed along. I was happy to do this for each of the remaining folders (years). I was very happy that it was going much faster than doing it on a project-by-project basis.

The next time I do this (to bring the laptop in line with my 'production' machine), rather than proceed through the ten folders one at a time, I'm going to go to the Photos group up at the top of the inspector - the one which shows you every single photo in the system - and try it there. I'm fairly confident that it should work. Identify a single image and find it's corresponding file. Then tell Aperture to do the entire selection. Once kicked off it may take 20 or 30 minutes, but I can wonder off and do something else.

It was smart enough to cope with differing paths for the masters. For example, the following image file paths can all be resolved in one go:

/Users/Gary/Pictures/CanonPowerShotG9/2008/2008 0510-Castle
/Users/Gary/Pictures/CanonPowerShotG9/2008/2008 0712-ParkVisit
/Users/Gary/Pictures/LumixDMCG1/2009/2009 0810-CountryWalk
/Users/Gary/Pictures/FujiFinePixEXR200/2010/2010 0203-InTheOffice

I don't know what might have happened in your upgrade process to cause this to happen in the first place, but sorting it should be quite straight forward. Good luck!

Regards,
Gary

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Answer 2

andrew_cw Author

Level 1

8 points

Apr 11, 2010 8:06 AM in response to Gary

Super, thanks Gary. I've just given this a go for one year, and its chugging away, so will next try it for the whole library overnight.

This makes sense when you think about it - I think I was confused earlier by some erroneous behaviour of the 'Reconnect All' button.

Andrew

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Answer 3

Jun 17, 2010 7:41 PM in response to Gary

Prior to upgrading to Aperture 3, I made all my photos Managed Files. After the upgrade, I have found that some of the photos are now referenced. Each of them has the disconnected icon. When I look at the dialogue box that you get thru Locate Referenced Files, it shows that Macintosh HD is offline. There seems to be no way to get back online, and therefore no way to reconnect the files. Also, the original files are in iPhoto, which makes it difficult to look them up.

Any ideas regarding how to fix this would be welcome.

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