iTunes doesn't see Aperture Library - iMovie doesn't see Aperture Library

@leonieDF,

Thanks for your reply.

I'm running Aperture 3.4.5 and Mac OSX 10.8.4

The Aperture library is stored in the default location in "Pictures"

The Aperture library is an old iPhoto library, specifically named "Main Family Library" and Finder sees it as "Kind: iPhoto Library"

Yes, I have run all 3 Aperture First Aid tools more than once using the Option + Command when starting the application including rebuiding the database when the first 2 options didn't work.

I haven't moved my library to a different drive, but if this would help I would be willing to give it a try.

Under "Security and Privacy" it says that FileVault is turned off for my hard disc

Well, I purchased my Mac in the fall of 2011 and I have never been able to access my videos through the iPhoto option in iMovie that I can remember. I guess that this has always been a problem and was addressed many times at the Mac Store but never resolved. In May of 2012 my machine crashed and all data I had on the drive was earased. Since then I could periodically see my Aperture library in iMovie, but only a handfull of videos.

As far as iTunes is concerned, I have only been aware of the problem for a few weeks, although it could have been there all along. I've always had problems with photos not updating on Apple TV, even AFTER the normal shutting down Aperture and iTunes, opening them back up, turning off Home Sharing, turning it back on, etc. When I recently tried to address this I tried selecting the option in iTunes to share my Aperture library instead of selecting the iPhoto library option. That's when I became aware of the problem with iTunes not recognizing the Aperture library. The Geniuses surmised that because I was also having so many problems with accessing my Aperture library in iMovie, that the issue was the Library and/or permissions.

@leonieDF - Not sure what your reply means.

Understood. I thought perhaps the period meant that I was finished and just needed to call Apple Care and fork out the fee. 🙂

The formats are primarily .MOV straight from the iPhone. Since going to a Mac, I have pretty much given up on using my Sony Handycam for family videos due to the pains of having to locate, identify, convert, and export AVCHD video to watch on Apple TV. It is just too easy to take video with my iPhone and import it and immediately watch it, although the quality is nothing close to a dedicated video camera, especially indoors and in lower light. All of the video formats in Aperture are supported and most all of my older home videos and Sony Handycam videos are sitting on an external drive (hoping that one day I will have the time to figure out a decent workflow to access them after I work all of the bugs out of iMovie). Great thought though.

All my content is managed. After a handful of One-to-One sessions at the Apple Store, I finally learned that you could not reference videos in iMovie and had to either have them in the iMovie Events directory or in iPhoto (at least that was what she said). Their solution was to import the videos into iPhoto so they could be easily accessed in iMovie. After I had issues mentioned in this post their solution was for me to purchase Aperture that could handle larger libraries. This was supposed to fix the issue and allow iMovie to see my videos. When that didn't work they said that I needed to purchase Final Cut Pro. I'm just a Dad who wants to make a few memorable home movies for his family and I don't think that I should have to purchase a $300 application, especially after paying a premium for my Mac and the iLife software, which I am deeply regretting. But I digress.

I have repaired permissions again and am in the process of repairing the library and will rebuild it again if that doesn't work. It is taking longer so I won't be able to post the results until a later time. Definitely worth a shot to try this again.

If this doesn't work I will take the time to create a new Aperture library. Like I previously mentioned, this was the last resort for another gentlemen who had a similar issue. After doing this it might explain why the "Reset Home Directory Permissions and ACLs" from the Command + Option + R recovery partition is getting hung up and not working. I'll post the results at a later date. If I could save just one person the time, gas, and stress I've experienced it would be worth it.

One additional question? I read a gentlemen's post that passionately argued against ever using iPhoto, Aperture, or iMovie to ever manage video files. He suggested using folders and a file naming system similar to what I used when I was on a PC using Adobe Elements. Do you have any thoughts on that?

For my situation, I have two concerns:

• I'm afraid this would not allow me to watch the videos on Apple TV as simply as I can now (although I don't know this to be the case for certain). If the videos aren't in my photo library, I'm not sure how I would be able to access them through Apple TV.
• Since I'm a proud Dad I have hundreds of video files spanning many years, so I also don't want to lose the ability to quickly peruse my event library and find content that I want to import into a project in iMovie. At one point I imported some video files to edit that weren't stored in iMovie, and I could only see the file name and date and had to guess if there was content on it that I wanted. When you have hundreds of clips like I do that isn't practical.

He argued that these programs were never meant to manage content and worked much more efficiently using this method. I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts.

Thanks again.

Unfortunately the repair tools did not work so I'm going to try and export my library into a new library created in Aperture. I'm going to take my time because in moving some old iPhone videos from PC to Mac in the past I lost a lot of data (mainly dates they were shot) and I can't have that happen with all of the photos currently in my library. I'll post when I've completed this task and the results.

Thanks. Importing seemed to work okay but I'm not clear why my new Aperture library is 135 GB larger than my old one.

After I move some things around I will see if iTunes will recognize the new library and post the results.

I didn't change anything but my One-to-One trainer did while tinkering with my Aperture library problem. What do you recommend for the preview settings? I don't remember what the original settings were before he changed them.

Here are my current settings.

This is very strange. Looking at this again I definitely had Share Previews set to "Always" but I had Photo Preview set to "Don't Limit." My library should be smaller now, not larger with the Photo Preview set to "Half Size."

My new library is 37.6% larger than my old one.

I'm at a loss.

So the library export is complete and I initially got excited when iTunes finally recognized my Apeture library. Now I have two new issues:

1) Apple TV does not recognize Events and only shows Phots, Faces, and Albums. Apple TV users can understand why this is completely unacceptable and unworkable, especially with a large library.

2) The new library being 37.6 larger than my old one will barely fit back on my hard drive (it is on an external drive right now pending transfer).

I'm looking into what to do next.