2000+ renamed masters; reconnect all doesn't even try

Question

Level 1

0 points

2000+ renamed masters; reconnect all doesn't even try

Long story not worth going into: I have a pile of master images that have been irreversibly renamed and are currently disconnected from the library. I can locate the master for a single image, the "Reconnect" and "Reconnect All" buttons light up, "Reconnect All" correctly reconnects that one image, but Aperture doesn't connect any more beyond that.

So basically Aperture does recognize that a master I find matches whatever criteria it uses to determine it's the file it expected, but doesn't search for any other masters within the same directory, leaving me to find the next match manually.

10.8.3, Aperture 3.4.4, Files located on a second internal drive.

Is there any way for me to have the computer do what it's best at and do this repetitive work for me? It clearly recognizes the match when I do the work myself.

Aperture 3, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.3)

Posted on May 7, 2013 11:20 PM

Reply

Answer 1

léonie

Level 10

194,755 points

May 7, 2013 11:33 PM in response to Lothaeron

For Aperture to find the match automatically the filenames must match.

Can you rename them all first and then try to reconnect again? Or restore your renamed masters from an earlier backup?

Is there a clear pattern to the renaming error, so you could do the renaming with an Automator action or AppleScript?

Another option would be to copy the disconnected masters to a different location and to reimport them. Then lift and stamp any edits and changed annotations that you want to save from the disconnected versions.

Regards

Léonie

Reply

Answer 2

Lothaeron Author

Level 1

0 points

May 7, 2013 11:43 PM in response to léonie

I know it's been reported that Aperture considers the filename as part of reconnecting but I figured since the single reconnection works fine Aperture had inspected the file enough to realize that despite the different name it was indeed the same file, and hey, maybe it should look through here for the others seeing as I asked it to reconnect all and it would be nice if it did it without me having to manually do so. But I digress.

I wish I could rename the files but they've been recovered from a deleted scratch disk ony after I found out that the other backup I had locally and the one up on CrashPlan had about 2000 zero byte files of corruption? catalog issues? I don't know; DiskWarrior and Disk Utility were no help.

TL;DR, I don't have a clear pattern for renaming these recovered master files.

So the reimport option would just be reimport all the masters images I have and thread them into my main library?

I was also toying with renaming ALL my masters using the date or something because the recovered images have the correct timestamp so I could _probably_ normalize on that…but really this just seems weird that I can't force Aperture to look for matches itself.

Reply

Answer 3

léonie

Level 10

194,755 points

May 7, 2013 11:54 PM in response to Lothaeron

I wish I could rename the files

You can see the filenames Aperture is looking for in thereconnect window, but that would be as much work as reconnectuing manually.

So the reimport option would just be reimport all the masters images I have and thread them into my main library?

To be precise "not all the masters images I have ", but all master images to image files with missing referenced files., yes. You can search for them using a smart search looking for the file status "missing" or "offline".

Reply

Answer 4

Lothaeron Author

Level 1

0 points

May 8, 2013 12:34 AM in response to léonie

Yeah, I wouldn't bother with the rename unless I had a way to automate it.

I still don't quite understand your suggestion.

I have saved a project with that search criteria and have been using that to manually select a portion of orphanded images to reconnect. I'm not sure how I take that set of orphans, and the set of all master files I have elsewhere that may or may not be correctly linked to images in the library, and then "reimport" only the missing subset.

Reply