Q: Lost my originals - can I get my pictures through the thumbnail preview?

Carolina, do you still have your original main Aperture library?

(my library was managed).

If your library is managed, the original master image files should be in the Aperture library package - have you checked, if they are really gone?

Ctrl-click (or right-click) the Aperture library in the Finder and use the option "Show package contents". In the window that opens, check the size of the folder "Masters". If it is large, there may still be some image files inside. Browse the year/month/date folders, if you can find your missing originals.

If the Masters folder is truely an empty shell, you can try to rescue your previews by dragging them from Aperture's Browser window to a folder on your Desktop.

• Select all image thumbnails in the browser and drag them from the Browser window to a folder on your Desktop or whereever you want them. Thiw will export the preview images as jpeg files.

It might help to know, what may have caused the library corruption. when did this disaster happen? Do you remember what you changed, installed, updated?

have you started a backup scheme now - atleast copied the corrupted library somewhere, so that you can fall back on it, if something should go wrong with the trouble shooting attempts?

Cheers

Léonie

Great, that you could find your original files.

The cause of the original disaster was working from an external drive that wasnt formatted for Mac

Yes, that explains a lot. On a wrongly formatted drive the connection to the originals can get lost and the internal databases corrupted, see: Use locally mounted Mac OS X Extended volumes for your Aperture library

So I have now done this but thought I would also split the years for my libraries. This also helps in backup smaller files than one large file. Having a child has exponetially grown my photo library!

 

So you are splitting the library because of easier backups? That is not really necessary, and you will lose a lot of Aperture's power. Aperture can copy with a million images. You could do incremental backups with vaults, or Time Machine, or clones.

Just consider - if you for example want o make a photo book or a slide show of the first seven years of your child, it will not be possible, because the images will be in seven different libraries. Or you want to show how a pariticular place has changed over the years - again it will not be possible. Or search for all images of roses, or birds, etc. So you may want to reconsider. Iif it will help you to set up your library again by starting with yearly libraries, no problem, you can merge them later. But don't be intimidated by library size.

My main Aperture library has images from more tha a hundred years, starting with the old family photos from my great-great-great grandparents.

I wasn't aware that it had to be reformatted. I had bought one that said it worked for Mac and PC but I was told (by an Apple Genius) that I shouldn't be running the library from the external drive where that drive wasn't formatted for Mac. So I have now done this

 

Just curious - after the Apple Genius told you that your drive had the wrong format, have you copied the library to a different drive and tried to rebuild it on that drive? Sometimes that will work, and you could save all your edits and tags.

Also, I didn't know whether working referenced might be a better option for me but I still need to gain more experience (and trust!)

Don't go referenced, unless you absolutely must. It is very useful for a gigantic library split across several drives, but an added complcation, and it is easy to make mistakes, if you are not an experienced Aperture user.

And in the future, hope to get a desktop Mac so think I'd prefer to store the photos all on there instead of my laptop.

A desktop mac can have a second internal drive for your main Aperture library, or a thunderbolt disk as external drive. That will give you a very good performance.

Do you recommend working from an external drive? Does it alter performance? I am using a USB3 seagate.

An external drive should use the fastest port you have. USB 3 is not bad, but Thunderbolt would be better. If you have plenty of RAM the speed of the disk is not that much important.

For a period of time, the external drive kept hanging but I did end up copying the library and getting it to work and then (last night) rebuilt the library based on importing the masters - some tags did come with it. I hadn't started getting into any major edits (besides auto enhance) so that wasn't an issue.

Have you run a disk check (from Disk Utility) on that drive? I would not trust it with any important data, until you know, why that is happening.