Completely Deleting Photos in Aperture

[Mr9758]

I've been using Aperture 2 for a while now and have accumulated quite a few photos. I deleted (using cmd-del) nearly a thousand photos in one folder a few days ago, but after scanning my Aperture albums with WhatSize, it shows that that folder still contains 2.2 GB (I confirmed this through Finder). These photos were stored in the Aperture library and there are only approximately 20 left in that project... so why is it still occupying that much space?

 

[cosmokanga2]

Aperture moves the deleted photos to a folder in the Trash. Try emptying the trash.

Also right-click "show contents" on the Aperture library and see what is still in there.

 

[Mr9758]

Thanks for the reply. There are tons of folders nestled within other folders, but one of the culprits seems to be a file named AP.Thumbnails that is 634 MB. I right clicked on the project and selected Delete Previews for Project, then Update Previews for Project, but the offending file hasn't changed.

 

[cosmokanga2]

This might help. Taken from dpreview.

This seems to work pretty well, if you notice that some of your thumbnails in a projct are incorrect (do not match the picture):

First, close Aperture.

Go into Finder and find your Aperture library (look in Aperture preferences to see where it lives).

Now right-click on that library and select "Show Package Contents".

This will open up a new finder window, with a file for every project. Go to the project file that you have your wedding photos in, right click and select "Show Package Contents" again.

Now you'll get yet another finder window - in here you'll see a directory (where all your pictures in this project live BTW), and a few other files. One of them is named "AP.Thumbnails".

Take that AP.Thumbnails file, and move it to your desktop. (to keep in case of issues).

Now open up Aperture again (you can leave the Finder windows open). Go into the project with the wedding photos, and select the project management view. At first all of your thumbnails will be blank. But after a little while you'll notice that it is re-creating all of them (you do not need to visit each one to have this happen). This may take some time... but when done, hopefully they will all be correct and you will see a new AP.Thumbnails file in that same project directory. I would avoid doing anything else in Aperture until the thumbnail rebuild is complete - scroll around the project management view to see progress.

If everything is to your satisfaction, you can just throw away that AP.Thumbnails file on your desktop. If something happens (and I really can't think of what would go wrong) just close Aperture and move the file back.

Also, in Aperture's preference, you can set the size/quality of thumbnails/previews. This might help reduce their size.

 

[Mr9758]

I attempted to move the photos from the problem project to a new one, then delete the project they were originally in and rename their new project. This lead to the maroon screen and "Unsupported image format" error message when attempting to view certain photos. There was a trick that involved changing the viewing perspective, but it did not keep the problem from coming back. This must have been a preexisting problem, because despite mucking with the Aperture package I didn't delete or move anything (in Finder). Hopefully this will be resolved by rebuilding the library (hold option-cmd when opening Aperture). What have I learned? Aperture isn't as reliable as I once thought. Time Machine is your friend. And Lacie/Amazon made another couple hundred dollars.

 

[Mr9758]

The library rebuilt itself successfully. There were a few missing pictures (weird ) and a small project with an amalgamation of photos from other projects seems to have been disconnected from the masters. I'd highly recommend that any Aperture user rebuild his/her library once in a while, as it seems to run considerably faster.

 

[pprior]

Sadly this sort of behavior (the red box with unsupported file, etc) is what caused me to leave aperture for Lightroom. I loved aperture's ease of use, but found it just too unstable over 2 years of use. I hope your problems resolve, but I think Apple needs to put some people working on their pro apps instead of spending every company resource on worthless iphone games.