My computer recently crashed and I was forced to recover all of my images (10,000). The files that I recovered are now on an external drive but are all RAW versions and have different names than the referenced names they once had which linked them to Aperture. Is there any way to re-establish the referenced connection with the library? Thanks.
Cheers.
Clint,
Bummer, sorry to hear about that. Glad you could recover the images, but it sounds like you didn’t have a complete backup? I hate to give advice when it’s too late, but PLEASE get, at minimum, Time Machine up and running. You can get USB drives from Amazon for very little (under $100 for 1TB, just over $100 for 2TB) these days. Remember your backup drive doesn’t have to be fast… a USB drive is just fine.
Also, as a second-level (and offsite!) backup, please consider using a service like Backblaze. As we say in the industry, if it doesn’t exist in at least three locations — one of them offsite — it doesn’t exist!
Enough lecturing :)
To relink your files, select the photos, and go to the menu File > Locate Referenced Files. This will open the Referenced File Manager and allow you to reconnect missing files. I built this screenshot for you to help explain the basics [screenshot].
If that doesn’t help you, I do have some advanced reconnection tips in Tip #13 in “ApertureExpert’s 15 Tips on File Management in Aperture 3”.
Good luck,
-Joseph @ApertureExpert
@PhotoJoseph
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