How to delete offline pictures?

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How to delete offline pictures?

I am using aperture 3.3.1 and have problems with deleting pictures from aperture.

I made a stupid mistake, when i was trying the library vault generates, I deleted the original aperture library. When I open the vault library i found of thousands of pictures are missing. Missing pictrues are in random order, and are all tagged as offline pictures. Thankfully many of the pictures are backup somewhere else, but there are some that are not. For other reasons I clean up my harddrive, so I am not sure if I can recover files that aren't in the directory.

The problem is that I don't want any offline pictures, either by recover them or delete them. Either way is fine, I need to know what is possible, and how can I do it.

Delete:

I have trouble deleting the offline pictures. When I right click I can only delete the version and preview, and those doesn't work. I think aperture doesn't allow me to delete is because it couldn't locate the master file. Is there a way to remove those offline pictures?

Recover:

I have saved all the thumbnails or preview using File Juicer, I am wondering if I can use those files to recover the offline file. It will be better then deleting them.

(If you had used file juicer before, you will know all the pictures lost its origional name.) My juiced folder contains 20000+ items, it has all the versions and master thumbnails, and i just want the master back. (So I want the thumbnail to be the master) I have no idea on how to do that, since aperture doesn't even allow me to locate reference file, because the picture wasn't referenced.

No matter how hard it will be I am willing to try. (Of course not telling me to do something manually for thousands of times...) Thanks!

OS X Mountain Lion

Posted on Aug 18, 2012 12:59 AM

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Answer 1

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léonie

Level 10

194,761 points

Aug 18, 2012 1:36 AM in response to Chaincux

The first thing you should check is, if the masters are really missing from the library that Aperture restored from your vault. Sometimes Aperture does not recognize the masters/originals inside the library. If you right click the Aperture Library Package > Show Package Contents, you will see the "Masters" folder. This is organized by "Import Session". If you imported an image at the first of June, 2010, it will appear in the folder 2010, June, ...

You can display the import session as one of the "Aperture" tags, if you edit the Metadata presets in the "Info" panel. If you find, that the missing masters are still there, you will have two options:

Back up your library and rebuild it. When rebuilding, Aperture usually moves orphaned images to a "recovered" project. If you are lucky, you may find all your missing masters there.
Back up your library and copy your Masters folder to your Desktop. Reimport it, with the option "Do not import duplicates" set. This way you only should import masters that are missing.

Delete:

I have trouble deleting the offline pictures. When I right click I can only delete the version and preview, and those doesn't work. I think aperture doesn't allow me to delete is because it couldn't locate the master file. Is there a way to remove those offline pictures?

Delete version should work - in what way does it not work? Do you get an error message?

Probably you need to repair your Aperture library or the permissions - see: Repairing and Rebuilding your Aperture Library.

Recover:

I have saved all the thumbnails or preview using File Juicer, I am wondering if I can use those files to recover the offline file. It will be better then deleting them.

(If you had used file juicer before, you will know all the pictures lost its origional name.) My juiced folder contains 20000+ items, it has all the versions and master thumbnails, and i just want the master back. (So I want the thumbnail to be the master) I have no idea on how to do that, since aperture doesn't even allow me to locate reference file, because the picture wasn't referenced.

Reconnecting does require that the filenames match. You will need recovery software that preserves the filenames, but I do not know of any that does that (but I heard it exists). So you will need to rename the (most important images to you) manually, to reconnect the versions - that will be hard work. Hopefully one of the otions I mentioned above will work.

Regards

Léonie

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Answer 2

Chaincux Author

Level 1

0 points

Aug 18, 2012 9:58 AM in response to léonie

Thank you for the response!

I have searched the master again, but they are all gone. I've search my drive and aperturewith the missing pictures and coulndn't find any except the preview stuff.

Anyway, I successfully deleted the pictures by using 'delete origional image and all versions' (don't know why i didn't see it earlier), and with smart album it successfully remove all the offline pictures.

Thanks!

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