Why does "update vault" NOT include auto imported photostream images

Vaults are created for backup purposes. They do not include images that have been uploaded online, whether to Photo Stream, Facebook, Flickr, etc., unless you've manually imported those pictures into your library.

I presume that the reasoning for this is that the images that are uploaded online are already "backed up", and don't need to be included in the vault. Either that, or Aperture needs to reflect the current state of whatever service you've used to upload your photos, and by restoring from an older state and displaying it, it would not accurately reflect that.

Aye, that sounds plausible, but is not really acceptable.

A vault is supposed to include all managed images, and the autoimport images are imported as managed and not referenced, at least in my library.

I checked my vault, and indeed - I cannot find any of the autoimported photostream images inside the masters folder of the vault.

My vault is so big, that I cannot restore from the vault right now - I do not have enough free disk space. Have you tried to restore from your vault and to check, if the restored library contains the autoimport images?

MacValley,

If you have it enabled in Aperture Preferences, a "Project" is automatically created each month you have new images in Photo Stream and the images are added to this Project. It is not an album. Albums are different from Projects in that they only contain pointers to photos. They are not containers with master images and versions, etc like Projects are. You can delete an album and no images are deleted. But if you delete a Project real images get placed in the trash.

The images in this automatic Photo Stream Project are separate from Photo Stream. You can delete them from Photo Stream and they remain in the Project. The Project is just like all other Projects with the exception that you can change its name and Aperture still knows it is the monthly Photo Stream project and will still add new Photo Stream images to it rather than creating a new one with the expected name.

All images from all Projects should be included in a vault update. Images in Photo Stream would not be included in a vault update. Have you tried updating the vault again to see if those 2 images eventually got added? I don't have an explanation why those images weren't there other than the vault update failed for some reason.

Thomas,

could you check your vaults, if you have any, please?

I am really puzzled - the autoimported images from the Photo Stream projects are included in the Masters folder in the Aperture Library, but the corresponding folders in the Masters folder in the vault do not exist. The masters for these particular projects clearly are treated differently. For all other projects the originals are in folders corresponding to the import session - in the Aperture library as well as in the vault. Only for the PhotoStream imports this symmetrie appears to be broken.

Léonie

I'll check mine. If they aren't in the vault then it must certainly be a bug. Those automatic projects are a little different as I explained in my post above. You can change the name and Aperture still tracks them as the auto-import location for Photo Stream.

I made a test and freed some disk space, so I could rebuild my vault:

Here are my current auto import projects: Noe the number of images in each project.

And that is the result after restoring the vault:

Nearly all images are missing 😟

I see only pngs and tiff - none of the images taken with the iPod or iPad is there.

I've checked the contents of my vault and a lot of the photostream images are in there. From the quick look I've had it's all the older images that are there, all the newer ones aren't. Could it be that items that have been in photostream for a while are backed up in the vault when they are no longer backed up on Apples servers i.e. they can no longer be re-downloaded from your photostream?

That was going to be my guess 😀 -- that since the Stream stays on iCloud for 30 days (as I understand it), images in it are Vaulted only after 30 days. Is there any chance that if you restore from a Vault, the Library will once again pull down the file from the iClouds?

Is there any chance that if you restore from a Vault, the Library will once again pull down the file from the iClouds?

That would be very risky for Apple to rely on that. You could reset the Photo Stream or delete the images from the PhotoStream after updating the vault, and then their would be no way to restore them.

And my results postet above for restoring my vault do show, that Aperture did not restore the Photo Stream projects correctly. It should not be the responsibility of the user to track down Photo Stream imports when restoring a library. If you import everything fromPhoto Stream then no images at all would be backed up. Perhaps Aperture regards PhotoStream imports erraniously as "referenced", even when they are not, and that is why they are excluded from vault backup.

It's broken. The images from the Steam that are imported into a regular Aperture project are in Aperture. From the manual

So according to the manual they are permanently stored in Aperture. If you look into the library at the masters folder you will see the images are physically there. The should be in the vault no reason for them not to be.

The crazy thing is even these images previews are not in the vault. As an experiment I tried making one of the imported photostream images referenced updating the vault bringing the image back into Aperture and updating the vault again. It still was missing.

The only way I could get one of these images into the vault was to export the original from Aperture and then re-importing it.

Shuttleworth125 you said that when you looked into your vault some old images that you imported from the photostream were there. Is it possible that these were imported in an earlier version of Aperture? It might have worked at one time but got broken in a later release.

This should definitely be reported to Apple. It's going to cause someone a lot of grief.

This may be anecdotal, but I checked my vault and the last photo stream image backed up was from 9/26/12. Coincidentally Aperture 3.4.1 was released 2 days later on 9/28/12 and I installed it the first day because I can't control myself.

Shuttleworth125 you said that when you looked into your vault some old images that you imported from the photostream were there. Is it possible that these were imported in an earlier version of Aperture? It might have worked at one time but got broken in a later release.

Yes that is the case, all vaulted photostream images were imported using the previous version of Aperture. My last vaulted image was taken on 27th September, which ties in with Thomas' observations.

I did the update on/near the day of release on my own computer, I've only just updated my wifes computer so I'll check that one if I can get near it!!

EDIT: Checked the wifes computer and she's not updated the vault recently, we shall have to have words!!! ( I do have other nightly backups running on her machine, but that's not really the point 😠)

It's broken.

....

So according to the manual they are permanently stored in Aperture. If you look into the library at the masters folder you will see the images are physically there. The should be in the vault no reason for them not to be.

My feelings exactly. 😠

I made another test: A new empty Aperture Library, and I switched the PhotoStream to this library, then I imported manually 95 images from the Photostream, created a vault, and updated it. The update promissed to add all 95 managed images to the vault.

The resulting vault still has 0 images - empty Masters folder, empty Previews folder.

I tried the same by importing manually from a Shared Photo Stream, same result.

So it does not matter, if you import manually to one of your projects or autoimport to a standard autoimport project.

After updating the vault: Two projects with images

After restoring from the vault: All projects empty:

The crazy thing is even these images previews are not in the vault.

That is the biggest bug of all. So not even the library structure is maintained.

That is why tested with an initially empty library. I suspected that some compression/duplicate detection algorithm might be interfering, and starting with an empty library no duplicates could obscure the results.

. Is it possible that these were imported in an earlier version of Aperture? It might have worked at one time but got broken in a later release.

I cannot confirm that. Some of the images that got saved to the vault in my first experiment have been imported after the latest update. But all of them are conspicious in a way, that Aperture treats these masters specially - either they have been edited in an external editor or they have a small pixelsize, so no preview is created and the master doubles as preview :

The list of the sole (Photo Stream) survivors after restoring my main Aperture Library from the vault: with the images manually imported from the PhotoStream their should have been 1313 images.

Searching all projects for the keyword "Photo Stream"- not only autoimport projects turned up these additional images in the restored library: a wide range of import session dates: