can locate referenced files but cannot find them in file chooser field

They are marked in red because to Aperture they are missing. If the files are in the located noted you reconnect them to Aperture using the bottom half of the window.

It's difficult to tell from your post if you have tried to reconnect them and are not able to or if you haven;t tried reconnecting them yet.

If you use Finder to go to the folder shown for them files are they there?

Message was edited by: Frank Caggiano

You wrote:

If I follow the folder structure, these files are all missing in the bottom half of the screen (file chooser).

This sounds like you are looking for them in the bottom half of the Find Referenced files Aperture screen.

Have you looked with the OS X Finder at the location the files should be? Do you have a backup of the referenced original files?

Just a thought, do you have spotlight indexing turned on for your external drive? If it's on your excluded list then searching for the file name in spotlight might not give any results.

I thought they were backed up on this hard drive,

What do you mean by "backed up"?

Is that drive not the original location where you imported the originals to?

and that I had just moved the versions to a new project, but obviously not.

What exactly have you moved, when and where?

If you relocated yor originals, you may have renamed them or the folder they are in. The default setting in the "relocate dialog" is renaming. So, if your originals are now inside renamed folders, your drive with an earlier backup may be using differnet path names or filenames. Also, when relocating originals, Aperture may have moved the files and not copied them, depending on the settings.

And what kind of drive is your external? The name "OpenShare" suggests a remote drive, not a directly connected drive? Have you been sharing the originals on that drive with other user accounts?

-- Léonie

I'm afraid if the files do not show up in the finder either then they are gone. Aperture will not move or delete originals on its own.

If Aperture still believes these originals should exist then the only explanation is that they were removed from the external disk in some way outside of Aperture, via the Finder or some other application.

While this is never a good situation feel lucky that you only seem to have lost 55 images, as you don;t know how this happened it could have been a lot worst. You need to take the time now to set up a good backup plan before you do anything else. As a minimum the external drive with the referenced originals needs to be copied right away to another drive. I would do this before trying to recover any images from the SD card. Again as you do not know how this happened anything is possible including a potential hardware problem with the drive.

Also please take some time to become more familiar with Aperture, the library and how the parts go together. From your posts you seem to be unsure of just what a version is and how versions and originals fit together and where they are stored.

Post back with any questions that come up while you do this and again please backup that disk ASAP.

regards