I normally import everything into the Aperture library, but apparently a few times I must have imported referenced files, which I no longer have. Since that happened, I've wiped my hard drive, sold my Mac, and bought a new one. So no chance of recovering the original masters. The photos are all "there" in Aperture, but I can't do anything with them, I just get an error that Aperture can't locate the referenced file and the master is offline. Is there any way to use the preview version stored in Aperture to recreate a new master, even if it's lower resolution? I went to the Genius Bar today, the best they could come up with was to do screen shots of the images to create a new jpeg, then reimport. Gotta be a better way than that, no? Hopefully someone can help... Thanks in advance.
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Aperture experts - need help with lost referenced files
- Thread starter nspindel
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I'm not sure if this is going to work for you or not... but it's worth a try.
Locate your Aperture library in the Finder. If you haven't manually moved it, it will reside in your Users > Pictures folder. Right-click the Aperture library and select "Show Package Contents". You'll then see a bunch of other folders.
You're looking for the "Previews" folder. Using the name of the Master file, search for this folder for a .jpg of the same name. Like I said, I can't say, for sure, what this is going to turn up.
On the system I'm testing this on, my brother's, there's a pretty large discrepancy between the file size of the "Previews" folder and the sum of all the jpegs in this folder. Not sure where the extra space is.
Good luck, let us know what you find out.
Locate your Aperture library in the Finder. If you haven't manually moved it, it will reside in your Users > Pictures folder. Right-click the Aperture library and select "Show Package Contents". You'll then see a bunch of other folders.
You're looking for the "Previews" folder. Using the name of the Master file, search for this folder for a .jpg of the same name. Like I said, I can't say, for sure, what this is going to turn up.
On the system I'm testing this on, my brother's, there's a pretty large discrepancy between the file size of the "Previews" folder and the sum of all the jpegs in this folder. Not sure where the extra space is.
Good luck, let us know what you find out.
Did you ever have any luck with this? I just ran across this File Juicer app and it reminded me of this thread.