Photo Stream is great. Take some photos, iPhone, iPad, whatever and with Auto Import checked in Aperture's Photo Stream preferences the images will automatically be …, yes what, moved or copied or referenced into automatically created albums?
To test what really happens I took two photos, one from an iPhone and one from an iPad. Later that day when I started Aperture I could see that there was a new album created for me: “oct 2012 Photo Stream”, and that album contained my two images. Great.
My strategy is that whenever I change something in Aperture I will directly update a vault, just in case something crashes. Today was no exception, the update was performed and by that I really made sure that my newly taken images were safe, at least that was what I thought!
I wanted to test a restore, you know, what is the meaning of a vault/restore mechanism if you do not train regularly? So ahead I went, started Aperture on my second Mac, and began the process of “Restore Library”. I chose my newly updated vault, and several hours later the restore completed. I did make a note of the number of pictures in the original library and wanted to check that it was the same as in the restore library. But NO! Two images less in my restored library!
The album “oct 2012 Photo Stream” was there all right but NO IMAGES! WHY?
Is it a bug or did I miss something along the road? Are auto imported photo stream images handled differently than images imported from e.g. a camera?
Could anyone clarify or give hints on what is wrong?
I use two equally configured Mac Minis, everything up to date: OS X 10.8.2, Aperture 3.4.1, 8 GB memory, vault resides on a NAS.
There’s already a long discussion of this same question also posted by MacValley in Apple’s Aperture discussion forum.
In my testing, Aperture 3.4.2 seems to fix the issue for new photos added to photo stream. It still doesn’t backup photos that were skipped with 3.4.1 unless you create a new vault. This issue isn’t mentioned in the change log for 3.4.2 so either it was a side effect of another change they made (lots of photo stream fixes in there) or they didn’t feel the need to document it. Or it really isn’t fixed yet.
Thomas