Hi there. I'm hoping someone can help me.

Today I seemed to have wrecked my library & renamed / moved all my original managed TIFF files on my main desk top computer, a Mac Mini. Everything (OS, Aperture, etc.) is current and up to date, version wise.

My usual workflow, on my main computer, is to import and save RAW files using Capture One, and then process selects as TIFFS, using Capture One. These are saved to folders ordered by date (year folders and monthly subfolders). From here I import into Aperture as referenced files.

While recently on holiday I stored my RAW files in my MacBook Pro. These were processed while on holiday in the MBP as per above RAW workflow.

The steps leading to today’s disaster were:

From my MacBook Pro, exported two Aperture projects (February & March projects from 2013 folder) as libraries, & saved these library files to an external hard drive where my referenced files live. My actual Mac Mini Aperture Library is on my Mac Mini.

Clicked import Library from Mac Mini Aperture and selected the February library. This imported and told me it was merging libraries.

Result was imported files where showing up as not connected to originals. At this stage I was viewing in “Library - Photos.” In other words, my viewer was showing all my photos, and I had simply scrolled to the very bottom to find the newly merged photos.

4. So, after selecting all these new files (using shift click), from File menu I ran “Relocate Originals for Project,” and when that didn’t work, “Consolidate Originals for Project” (can you tell I was mostly guessing as I went?).

That didn’t work, so I tried “Locate Referenced Files,” which I had only then noticed. I suspect this is what I should have done first.

End result, almost all of my TIFF files (as in, all of the ones that I’ve ever imported into Aperture, not just the holiday ones) have been renamed, with the original file name followed by “Snow Trees 3 Toned.” This appears to have been done using one of my “Export Version” naming structures, of “Version Name with Custom Name.” From memory, this was what I last exported with when last using Aperture before I went on holiday. These TIFF files have also all been moved (on my external drive) to the February subfolder in the 2013 folder where I store my post Capture One TIFF files (this was also the Project highlighted when I hit “Import Library” I guess, don’t know if that had any influence on what happened - nothing appears to have been added to that project).

The only files that seem not to have been renamed / moved are some which are not TIFFs (some jpeg and PNG files) and those TIFFS which have been created by third party plug-ins (resized for printing, etc.).

8. Within Aperture, apart from the March project (see note below), I can still find all of my referenced files where they should be (in the app), they just take a while to load as previews are rebuilt.

9. Foolishly, I haven’t backed up my external drive for quite a long time (since October 2012 - idiot!), so that is no help for the more recent stuff. I did try Time Machine (which only looks at my internal drive) and restored both the Aperture app and the library from before this all happened, but the only result that had was that Aperture now gets hung in processing the “February” project (which apparently only has 33 pre-holiday photos in it).

Because I do my selecting & RAW processing in Capture One, at least I’m not looking at kazillions of files, but still, this is around 5000 files now all in the same folder and all ending in Snow Trees 3 Toned.” Yikes!

I suspect nothing can be done now, but any help would be greatly appreciated - especially in avoiding this again, so thanks in advance.

Dean