All of my photos are gone in aperture. The library is still 70 GB though

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All of my photos are gone in aperture. The library is still 70 GB though

My aperture library is about 70 Gb. Since a day or 2 when I open the program, it only finds the 21 photos i last imported by dragging them onto the aperture icon.

All the rest don't appear.

I tried 2 different time machine backups (up to a moth old)

I tried repair permissions, repair database and rebuild database. All 3 of them are finished rapidly, maybe becaus of only 21 photos in the database?

I uninstalled aperture, reinstalled and the result is still the same...

What can I/ should I do?

Anyone with suggestions?

Marijn

Aperture 3, Mac OS X (10.7.2)

Posted on Oct 13, 2012 7:11 AM

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Answer 1

marijnS Author

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Oct 13, 2012 7:15 AM in response to marijnS

I forgot to mention: OSX 10.7.5 Aperture 3.4.1 on an imac.

hoping this helps. 🙂

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Answer 2

léonie

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200,723 points

Oct 13, 2012 8:17 AM in response to marijnS

Marijn,

there are two typical reasons for this kind of problem, that I can think of:

either you accidentally created a second Aperture Library, when you imported your last batch of images,
or you may have set a filter in the browser, and Aperture is hiding your images.

Check first, if you are viewing the correct Library:

When you launch Aperture directly on your current Aperture Library by double-clicking your 70GB Aperture Library, do you see then all your images?

If not, check if the filters in the browser and in the library inspector panel are cleared and set to "Showing All" or all items.

Regards

Léonie

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Answer 3

marijnS Author

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Oct 13, 2012 12:23 PM in response to léonie

Hi Leonie,

thanks for your reply, i wasn't aware of the all items in the library part. That was new to me.

Too bad both filters weren't on and i had the right library.

There is still something very mysterious going on.

I have my library in dropbox so i can acces it on my macbook and imac.

When the imac didn't want to open it, i tried on my macbook and it didn't open it either.

Just 2 days before i had to reinstall dropbox on my macbook because it wouldn't open.

Then i merged the dropbox online with my dropbox in the cloud. Do you think that might have caused the problem?

I didn't think of before becaus all was working well after i merged.

Hopefully you or anyone else has some more thoughts on it.

😕

Marijn

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Answer 4

léonie

Level 10

200,723 points

Oct 13, 2012 12:57 PM in response to marijnS

Then i merged the dropbox online with my dropbox in the cloud. Do you think that might have caused the problem?

I am afraid, yes. It is very risky to sync your Aperture library over a network. There is no guarantee that sharing a library between two macs will work, see Apple's support article:

Use locally mounted Mac OS X Extended volumes for your Aperture library

It is very likely that syncing by Dropbox has corrupted your library. Any writing to the Aperture library has to be done by Aperture and not by Dropbox or any other application.

Your best bet, if you want to use the library on the MacBook and the iMac would be to put it on an external drive and to plug this into whatever Mac you are using.

You say, you have backups. Try to restore from the backup, but not to your Dropbox, but to an external disk, formatted MacOS X Extended (Journaled).

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Answer 5

marijnS Author

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Oct 14, 2012 2:35 PM in response to léonie

Yes Leonie,

this worked! you're a hero to me.

I got the back up from time machine and choose to keep both libraries.

The original i left in dropbox and the other i moved to user/pictures. When it was there i opened it for the first time and YES they were there.

Thanks a lot!

Marijn

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Answer 6

léonie

Level 10

200,723 points

Oct 14, 2012 2:43 PM in response to marijnS

Great, Marijn!

I am glad you got your pictures back. 🙂

Léonie

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