Aperture won't reconnect some files

[smackie]

At the moment, I'm trying to run Aperture and iView MediaPro/ACR/Photoshop in parallel to get some experience with Aperture to see if it's something I want to migrate to. Obviously, I'm running Aperture with referenced files into my primary image archive.

Last night I ran across something that I figured I'd share with folks as it's a pretty serious bug for folks trying to do this. Due to some remote work, I often have to reconnect images from one drive to another - no big deal, the drives all have the same basic structure so it's just a matter of picking one file in the heirarchy and hitting "Reconnect All" in the dialog box.

Unfortunately, there's a problem here.

The Aperture logic for reconnecting files seems to expect the files to be *exactly* the same as they were when they were originally imported. This would match Apple's approach to dealing with raw files. Oops. I had a bunch of DNG files that I reworked in ACR4 and updated in my archive. I also had a couple of TIFFs that I reworked, recropped and resaved. All of these files refuse to reconnect in Aperture. This is pretty frustrating as I *know* the files are the same but they're failing some silent, internal Aperture check that makes them eligible to be reconnected. As far as I can tell, its being keyed on either image size or file size but it's fairly frustrating all the same.

I'm going to try a few experiments over the weekend to see if I can work out what the exact trigger is but I figured I'd mention it here in case someone runs into the same thing.

Oh, I'll be filing it as a bug too...
 
Scott...
 

[peterkrogh]

Scott,
This kind of problem is one of the things that DAM software has to be able to handle. I can see why Apple engineers might want to use modification dates, for instance, as an important part of file identification, (very important if, for instance, the user does not give images unique names), but it can then cause pain when a user does something in a way that they don't expect.

The only way applications can be really smart about this stuff is if the are ut there for a long time, and they listen to users.  It's one of the reason that image management applications are so hard to build.

File those bugs and help Apple to get it right.

BTW, I had a similar problem with iTunes that led to the loss of 4 years of carefully crafted playlists.
Peter

[smackie]

I just tried 1.5.3 in the hope that they'd managed to fix this problem. Sadly, altho' they've listed improvements to the reconnect logic in the fixed bugs for 1.5.3, Aperture doesn't seem to be any better behaved when reconnecting images that have been edited in an external editor. I guess I need to refile the bug with Apple...

Sigh.

Scott...