Aperture: I want to point references to new drive

[Sirolway]

I have all my photo masters on an external drive (‘G Drive mini’). This drive contains *only* my Aperture Referenced Masters (~350GB of them). I recently bought a new SSD drive (‘Oyen Shadow’) & copied all the images to it. I’ve checked (Get Info & rsync) and all the files are on the new drive. I’ve now disconnected the old drive.

I’ve gone into Aperture > File > Locate Referenced Files and most references are now pointing at the new drive.

But the old drive is still showing up twice as an ‘offline’ drive, accounting for 19,000 & 482 (respectively) masters. I want to point these references at the new drive, or at least ‘forget’ the old drive so that the references become invalid & I can ‘fix’ them by repointing at the new drive.

If I click ‘show only files not found’ there are no files listed



Am I making sense & can anyone help?

 

[Ray2]

You're just going to have to keep locating missing files until Aperture finds them all. Apparently you changed the drive name, not a good choice.

This is a particularly weak part of Aperture and you're just going to have to keep running the same command over and over again until it reconnects all of the files. Try unchecking the box. Try holding down the option key before you click on reconnect all. Do not reimport from the new location, it just creates more issues. Go to next paragraph.

If you have your old library and external still around, I'd consider starting over. Change the old drive's name, name new drive what old drive used to be named, copy your files into the exact same hierarchy. If that's not possible, this is an excellent time to migrate to Lightroom. I used Aperture for a long time and it's data base management is weak.

 

[Sirolway]

Well, I didn’t rename the old drive, I retired it as it was becoming unreliable. So I could either have carried on using the old drive until it failed, or moved to a new drive. I chose to move to a new drive.

And I have no problem reconnecting the photos … except that for about 500 of 82,000 images that option simply isn't available:

• I select all 82,000 images & go into File > Locate referenced Files
• Almost all appear under the new drive, but there are 482 that are still under the old drive, which is shown as Offline
• If I click an image from this old drive in the top window, I can click the new drive in the bottom window & Aperture will find the image on the new drive
• But the Reconnect & Reconnect All buttons are greyed out, so I’m not able to tell Aperture to use the new drive for this image, rather than the old one
• If I exit this screen, find the image, right-click & select ‘Show in Finder’ I get the message ‘The file xyz could not be found, because the volume on which it resides is currently offline’

I have repaired the Aperture library, but that didn’t help.


So all I want to do is point these 482 images at the master files located on the new drive, but I don’t seem to have any options to do so…


Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks in advance ..

 

[Ray2]

If possible, rename your new drive to what the old one was named. Replace your Aperture library with your pre drive change backed up copy. Open Aperture, done.

In the event you did not keep a backup of a functioning library with 82,000 images on it, some thoughts, not necessarily steps:

Have you pressed the Option key to see if it goes from grey to black?

You could import them but you lose your edits and they may not import anyway (my recollection).

Read up on Reprocess Originals. As I recall it needs to scan all the image files. I don't what it will do for images Aperture thinks are missing. I vaguely remember using this approach to reconnect missing images. Just select a small range of images, some before a missing image to a few behind. See what it does.

 

[Sirolway]

Success!!

Holding down the option key in ‘Locate Referenced Files’ made the ‘Reconnect’ button available & I was able to reconnect all 482 orphaned photos with the new drive - perfect!

I didn’t want to move backwards, as I had 82,000 photos successfully migrated onto the new drive; I didn’t want to go backwards & risk some of them becoming orphaned. I also didn’t want to rename the new drive to be the same name as the old drive.

I just wanted to be able to reconnect the orphaned photos to the new drive, which is what I’ve now done - thanks

(And, yes, I have a few backups of the library!)


So thanks for your help & patience - it got me there in the end

 

[Ray2]

Nice. Glad it worked out.

 

[JohnDS]

I hope you are planning for the day when Aperture stops working. It is now unsupported and some future OS upgrade is sure to break it completely. I loved Aperture, but saw the handwriting on the wall a year ago and have switched to Lightroom.

 

[ChrisA]

I hope you are planning for the day when Aperture stops working. It is now unsupported and some future OS upgrade is sure to break it completely. I loved Aperture, but saw the handwriting on the wall a year ago and have switched to Lightroom.

With ANY of these photo libraries LR, Aperture or whatever you could plan ahead for the NEXT time you have to swap out a disk drive. What I do is make an ALIAS on the main built-in disk drive that points out to some external drive. Then when I want to move the library I only have to change the alias and Aperture/LR never knows the drive was swapped out.

You can make an alias using Finder with two-finger (right button) click.