Aperture 3.3.2 unresponsive if library contains old iPhoto albums - solution

Aperture 3.3.2 introduced the "Keep Projects & Albums arranged by : Date" function. At last! but sadly this new feature can cause problems including unreponsive projects and albums, failure to launch and crashes.

This appears to be due to albums imported from iPhoto at some point in the past, which do not support the date function and cause the sort function to fail silently.

If you are having problems with aperture 3.3.2, check the Console application in OSX to see if warnings appear when you select "Keep Projects & Albums arranged by : Date":

8/6/12 6:22:32.589 PM Aperture: [<RKAlbum 0x1240e7a20> valueForUndefinedKey:]: this class is not key value coding-compliant for the key minImageDate.

This indicates you have the same problem I have. The solution is to remove or replace these albums in your library by creating new albums (do not use 'duplicate album').

If you can't remember which albums are iphoto albums, you can use gdb in xcode to get the album names:

In the Activity Monitor Application, find the PID of Aperture (type aperture in the search box and check the first column)

In the Terminal Application, run the following.

/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/bin/gdb /Applications/Aperture.app/

Then type

attach <PID of Aperture>

Then when it finishes loading symbols, type

print-object 0x1240e7a20

Where the number (0x1240e7a20) is the same as the one in the console error message.

For example:

(gdb) print-object 0x1240e7a20

<RKAlbum: 0x1240e7a20 > modelId = 4627, uuid = '+i7gr2x0SFyR8ifpB2a6dw' name='iphoto dupes 4', displayName='iphoto dupes 4'

Then type

c

to continue execution of aperture, locate the album (e.g.) iphoto dupes 4, and then select all photos in the album, select new->album, type the new name (can be same as old name) then delete the old album.

Repeat this until all bad albums are gone.

If you have many, this will be a LONG process, and you are likely to encounter crashes along the way - bad luck!