P e r a m b u l a r e

Those of you who are into photography and follow my Twitter stream, might have noticed that I’ve had some issues with Aperture, Apple’s pro-level photo management and editing application. I think I’ve fixed the issues I’ve been having and thought I’d write down what I did in order to help others who might have the same problem.

Issue One: Aperture Crashes
Shortly after starting up Aperture, I found that it would always crash. Each time it crashed, it seemed like it was making thumbnails when the crash would happen. Checking the system logs, I could only find reference to “bus error”. I tried, several times, to rebuild the library, but that would only take a huge amount of time and then crash anyway.

I decided I would open the Aperture library and remove many of the projects and try and rebuild. As soon as removed the project that contained my thousands of pictures from my world trip, Aperture would launch. Adding that project back into the library caused the application to start crashing again.

Inside each project folder are import folders for all the import sessions that you’ve done. After some fruitless mucking about in those folders, I decided to do it the hard way: I pulled all 59 folders out and then add them back one by one while rebuilding the library. It took a long time, but eventually I discovered that three folders containing some 450 pictures were causing Aperture to crash.

I couldn’t stand to lose that many images, and having a hunch that only a handful of images were causing the problem, I started to try and find them. At first I thought the previews that were in the import folders were to blame, but it turned out to be worse than that: my camera RAW images were to blame. I confirmed this by opening them in any number of applications, all of which crashed. Even “cp” from the command line was throwing up errors left and right.

I didn’t want to rebuild my library another 450 times, so I wrote a quick program in Perl to track down the bad files. Once I had the list, I moved the import files into a backup folder and rebuilt the library. That fixed it, and I only lost 47 pictures. I still have the corrupt files on my disk, but I can’t seem to be able to salvage them with anything.

Issue Two: Thumbnails Don’t Match
In all that rebuilding and moving of items and so on, my thumbnails started behaving oddly. Some pictures had thumbnails that were from other pictures in my library. After a lot of hacking around, I deleted all the thumbnail database files (AP.thumbnails and it’s ilk) and then went into the thumbnail view for all the pictures and scrolled through them all. It took a while, and my MacBook Pro got really really hot, but it worked.

Issue Three: Smart Album Syncing
I thought this had something to do with iTunes 8, but that was not the case. The issue was that some Smart Albums that had hundreds of pictures would show up in the iPhone sync pane in iTunes as having only 10 or 20 images.

After digging around in the Preferences and Caches folders, I finally took a long hard look at the ApertureData.xml file in my Aperture library. Turns out that it only listed the smaller number of pictures, despite Aperture showing me the full lot. Curious, but I still wasn’t closer to a solution.

While playing around in Aperture the other day, though, I hit the slideshow button and instead of doing a slide show, it proceeded to build previews for a slideshow. It struck me as odd, and I stopped it. I selected all the pictures in one of the Smart Albums, and right clicked and chose “Update Previews”. A good long while later, it was done, and the XML file showed the expected number of files. Opening iTunes and syncing confirmed that the problem was gone.

Conclusion
Bugs happen. But if you are fairly calm, can think logically through issues, and are willing to do some trouble shooting, you can often figure out what’s going on. Some of the issues I’ve had above have probably been solved by others, but I could not find information on them — either my Google-foo is weak or the people who have fixed them didn’t blog or post about their fixes.

Daring Fireball posted a link to Steven Frank’s post on reporting bugs in Mac OS applications at roughly the time I was having my Aperture issues. I tried to gather a lot of that data and send it along to Apple, but since the issue was corrupt files that only I have access to, I’m not sure they got much in the way of helpful information.

When possible and appropriate, I believe people should share their knowledge with others. If I had been able to find some articles on what to look for when Aperture crashes, or an indication of what to do when Smart Albums go wrong, I’d have been in much better shape. As it is, I am only 5000 or so photos behind in my editing.