Thumbnails building on launch, impermanent and missing several years

Leonie,

Thank you again!

The 2008 thumbnail folder appears to include only the normal monthly activity, but inspect files numbers in each (using command-i to look at numbers of items in each folder, in each month) I do indeed find one day in 2008 that includes multiple-thousands of thumbnails. I conclude that it must be the date I imported a huge iPhoto library.

That explains why I appear to have a thumbnail for each picture, going back to the first photo by date (2005), in spite of the (redundant) rebuild that wants to happen automatically with each launch of Aperture.

I intend to do your recommendation: to manually highlight all photos prior to 2008 and generate thumbnails.

However, while waiting (expecting a long delay before I received an answer--I was wrong about that--thanks again!), I highlighted those same photos, and did a "reprocess from masters". That will take me a long time.

Then I will try the generate thumbnails.

Then I will report back!

Even on a blazing fast machine--MBP retina, with 750G flash drive, and Masters stored on 6TB raid via thunderbolt-eSata--these things take time! And I'm mindful to try (to change) *one thing at a time* to see if it fixed the problem, so that I can benefit from (and share with others) a simple cause-and-effect confidence that I fixed a problem.

FYI: I have been stalled in my editing now for almost 48 hours. Two days ago, my formerly reliable Aperture editing procedure began to freeze (spinning beach ball) while I tried so fairly routine edits on pictures. I'm not sure the editing problem still exists, because I have allowed myself to become side-tracked by this rebuild issue, thinking I might solve my editing problem in the process. However, the two might be completely unrelated.

I'm still trying to figure out what I changed (if anything) that might have caused the spinning beach ball. I can think of only one thing, and it has to do with previews--but I had better put that aside for now, until I can move ahead with this thumbnail issue (or just ignore it, if I can't fix it, as I was doing before the problem occurred, without apparently affecting the editing efficiency, prior to 48 hours ago).

I have customers waiting patiently, but Aperture is stalling my ability to generate income.

Were it not for this community--and particularly your help over the last 24 hours--I would be much more anxious!

Cheers,

Patrick

Aha! Thanks.

I have no iPhoto smart albums.

Interesting: a couple of years ago I converted to a thumbnails-only library, deleting (or attempting to delete) Previews, in order to have the smallest possible library, for several reasons.

I notice, however, that I have a Previews folder, and it has multiple files. And that is after running a "delete previews" on all photos, several times.

(I canceled the photo reprocess. I'll try the Shift key trick next.)

Patrick

Leonie,

Is there a way to track down corrupted files (a Preview, or a Master, or whatever)?

I have run the usual first aid (command-option on launching), all three options.

And since I don't currently want Previews, would you predict that it will be OK to drag that folder to the trash?

Patrick

A follow-up to this recurring crashing with one particular project.

I *seem* to have at least progressed.

The editing of this project caused me many frustrating stops and restarts, which take precious time, of course, and shake confidence in both the integrity of the library, and the files.

The reply above (thank you, Leonie) helped, although indirectly. I don't use previews, but I did generate previews for this project to see if that was somehow necessary, and to see if it would isolate one or more problem files, as suggested. In short, previews were generated without incident. But it did not fix the problem.

The idea however inspired me to try something else. (For anyone following this, I have been through a long list of troubleshooting--the usual steps--with no success.)

I exported all the files (masters, referenced) that I had not edited so far (they are organized by date, in other words, in shooting order by time) to the desktop. Then I re-imported them, in a separate project.

Either by luck, or engineering, that fixed it. I was then able to complete editing the project without a hang. (To be clear, this is the only project so far that has crashed the software like that. Many more have projects been imported since, and edited successfully, without crashing . . . so far.)

So either the export-import trick appeared to help; or it's possible it had nothing to do with it (as in, the trouble file was not among those files).

(I should run the same trick on the remainder of the project, then attempt to edit that part of the project, and see if all goes smoothly . . . which would strengthen the export-import step as troubleshooting fix. When I have more time. . . .)

But export-import might be a useful extra step to add to the list of troubleshooting steps.

Good question. I forgot to say that I used the newly-generated masters (now in a folder on my desktop) as the new referenced files.

I'm not sure exactly what step I'll take next. I'd like to complete the housekeeping and try and isolate the funky file(s) and clear them out.

But it all takes so much time. And I have customers. . . .

Thanks again for your original support and interest. Maybe this will help someone else too. . . .