Application moved error and question marks for dock app icons - related?

i am reposting this in the Mac Pro forum in addition to the Mountain Lion forum as i have been posting various issues on the mac pro here and i have gotten great help in solving them. also i am hoping to put a finishing touch on my computer setup after having done a FRESH INSTALL of the OS on both my computers with a manual migration of data (no Library items) so as to try and resolve old issues. i hope the experts on the list do not mind this posting and/or can offer advice on this specific issue.
i am getting the attached error this morning on my MacBookPro (Mountain Lion) and have gotten it before on my Mac Pro (Lion). i have had to do a fresh install of the OS and a manual migration of my data (no Library settings etc) due to slightly similar issues.
does anyone know what this errror is saying has happened?
i /did/ have an additional internal hard drive on the MAC PRO that Spotlight was indexing and which i had to take off of the Spotlight indexing functionality but this does not explain in any way (since there are no additional HD's on my macbookpro) why it just happened this morning on the macbookpro.
is this related to an issue where there may be QUESTION MARKS (instead of an app icon) in the dock in some of my other software?? i have one of these on my MBP and one on my MacPro even after the fresh install.
TIA

The Dock stores Aliases to the actual Applications. When you get a question Mark, it is caused by a Bad Link. The Application may have changed versions, moved, or been deleted. There is nothing especially magical about this. You can remove a Bad Link by dragging the link off the Dock, or add a proper link by dragging the Application Icon onto the correct area of the Dock.
OS X Mountain Lion: Customize the Dock
Apple-installed Applications need to remain in the Applications folder so that they remain protected and can be updated properly. The Installer will attempt to add links that point to the current Applications in the Applications folder, but if you have a pre-existing Bad Alias your bad Alias will not be Trashed. This may give you either the "moved..." message, or the Question Mark Icon in the Dock, or a grayed-out Icon with a "prohibited sign" if you have added things not appropriate for this version of Mac OS X.

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I cleaned up my mac and now all my applications are gone. I try to open them and it has a question mark on the app icon. Everything from System prefrences, Everything in itunes, iphoto, preview and mail? Please help

I cleaned up my mac and now all my applications are gone. I try to open them and it has a question mark on the app icon. Everything from System prefrences, Everything in itunes, iphoto, preview and mail? Please help

These question marks are on your dock? And you can't open applications from your dock?
If so, try this: Open a new finder window and navigate to the Applications folder in your hard disk. The applications in question should still be in there (the Applications folder). So drag each of the application icons that you want to be available on your dock from the Applications folder onto your dock, one by one. Take each of your question mark icons that are on the dock and drag them off the dock to get rid of them. See if that fixes you up.
Now, if your hard disk no longer has an Applications folder in it, or the Applications folder is empty, you are going to have to reinstall OS 10.6 then do a software update to bring you back up to OS 10.6.8. You may be able to just go to the "optional installs" folder on the installer DVD and maybe all the stock applications are there -- I don't remember and I don't have an installer DVD handy to look. That would be way easier than doing a full blown OS reinstall. Also, as I recall, if OS 10.6 was on the computer when you bought it from the store, I think there should be an "extras" DVD that has a handful of applications that could be reinstalled from it, too.

Catalogs, Missing Files, and Question Marks for Beginners

Hello, fellow non-power-users. I just wanted to post something here that I've learned with my travails and travels using LightRoom 3. In the past, Adobe has paid me to write for them, and I'm a professional writer. So why am I doing this for free? Because I wish to heck I'd understood this stuff before I dove into LR. Somehow, even with reading a book on the program, I didn't really get it.
1) Most of the people who are kind enough to post and help on Adobe support and other forums on the Interwebs are power users of Lightroom. The great thing is, they often know what they're talking about. The bad thing is, many of them don't understand what it's like to be a non-power-user who really has no intention of becoming a power user. Be very, very careful before you try to take their advice about any large issue that might have serious consequences for your photos.
2) LR has about forty million ways to do things, so it can be overwhelming, and you may also receive lots of contradictory information about how to accomplish stuff. If you're like me---not a professional photographer, more a refugee from the annoying land of iPhoto who just needs a *little* more power and customization---you may have trouble streamlining, figuring out the few things you actually need the program to do for you. Try some introductory videos and tutorials, even books, but don't expect them to solve your real problems with the program.
3) Before you begin, grasp a few concepts:
     a. When you're working in LR, you're working with a "catalog." It shows you images of your photos, but these aren't really your photos. Your actual photos are *files* that live on your computer somewhere. Think of it as a slideshow projected on a wall: you can see the photos on the wall, but they aren't the "real photo." If you walked up to the wall and painted on the projection of a slide, the "real photo" file would not be changed. What LR does is keep track of those wall paintings for you, so if you wanted to print up a version of that slide and include your brush strokes, LR could do that for you. The catalog is a type of database.
     b. So where are those real photos, those files? Probably all over your computer in different places. You may want to consolidate them all in one place before you start using Lightroom. Here's why: once Lightroom thinks your "real photo" is in a certain place, it doesn't want you to move the "real photo" file. Say you have a photo called that someone sent in email. You put it on your desktop. Now you are tempted to drag-n-drop it onto Lightroom. DO NOT DO IT. Because someday, you might want that photo to not clutter up your desktop. You'll drag it to another folder on your hard drive, and BOOM, now Lightroom cannot find the photo.
You can't work on the photo from within Lightroom. You can't print it. Lightroom will show a question mark ? on its wall-projector slide of your photo file. Often when someone moves files on their computer, it's not a single file on a desktop. It's a bunch of things they are trying to organize. Adobe knows this, which is why they have a "find missing photos" command. They know you are likely to screw this up. The command will show you those missing files. You have to select them individually by hand and search your computer for them to relink. You can spend a lot of time relinking photos. It sucks. Really sucks.
     c. If you do need to move stuff, Lightroom does let you do it, but only from within the program. So, open up LR, and look in the left-hand column for an item called "Folders." (You will be in Library mode to make this happen.) You can move your "real photo" files around from within this area. It is a clunky process and an enormous pain in the butt.
     d. Rant time: For some reason, one of the most sophisticated and long-lived software companies in history, the developers that completely changed the worlds of art, design, photography, and publishing--you got it, Adobe--have not been able to solve this problem and chase down your real photo files if you moved them from within the Finder, the way you normally move files on a computer. Go figure. (Irrelevant note: I've been using their products since Pagemaker 1.0 and it's sort of astonishing that they've never solved this problem, in LR or InDesign or elsewhere. It's like publishing a magazine using Quark in 1995, rushing to find the messed-up links before you hand-carry your ZIP drive over to the printer. Hee hee.)
4) Decide whether you want to divide your photos into a few separate catalogs, or whether you want one enormous catalog ("master catalog"). Then try not to change your mind.
Here is my story:
Summary: I started with multiple catalogs and regret merging them into one.
I hired a photographer/supposedly-LR guy to set up my LR and he suggested multiple catalogs, each easily saveable (catalog AND its photos) to a single external hard drive. I only made two: one for family photos, one for a big art project. Whenever I asked questions online about using LR, everyone told me to combine all photos into one big master catalog. Eventually I did, and I regret it. As a non-power-user, I screwed up something in the merging process, and ended up with a lot of question-mark, missing-photo problems, and a bunch of duplicate photos to boot. What a waste of time.
If you're not a pro, you probably don't need a gigantic single database to deal with. If you're someone who uses Dropbox or another non-Adobe cloud method to store and work with your photos, and you don't have unlimited storage, you may find it way more convenient to have a few different catalogs.
Power users probably don't screw up the process of merging all their catalogs into one. Power users have, from what I've read online, many complicated ways of making a big master catalog work the way they want, say for working on small numbers of files while traveling with a laptop, and then getting that work into the giant master catalog when they get back home to their studios.
But I am not a power user, and if you're reading this, you probably aren't a power user either. So perhaps my experience will be useful to you.
5) Paying for plug-ins to help with all this nonsense.
You can buy plug-ins that help you do things this application should already do by itself. For example, "Duplicate Finder" goes through and finds all the photos that you've accidentally imported more than once into your catalog. Then you can painstakingly go through, figure out which copy to keep, and delete them. Often, these "duplicate" photos are not duplicates of your "real photo" file. But at some point you moved your "real photo" file while you were tidying up your computer files, and later accidentally re-imported that photo into your LR catalog. Since LR doesn't follow your files around when you move them from within your computer/Finder, LR thinks it's a whole brand-new file. It's like your projector is projecting three images on the wall at the same time. You have to figure out which one to keep, which one will save your wall-painting changes, etc. And it is a huge pain in the butt.
Note that you can click a box when importing photos, a box that says "Do not import suspected duplicates." This can be really helpful for avoiding duplicates in the first place. It is not, however, infallible.
OK, I hope this helps someone somewhere. I'm going to go back to the horribly time-consuming task of relinking files and trying to make my brain work the way LR's brain works.

Glad to help!
Another good thing to do from time to time is to boot from your install CD, then choose "Disk Utility", then do a check (and repair, if necessary) of your boot disk.
You can't verify or fix a disk you've started from, thus the need to boot from a CD. You can boot from a second hard disk to do this test if it has MacOS on it.

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Hello!
Sometime in the last few days I've noticed that a bunch of the icons in my Finder have strange little question marks and check marks on them. I first noticed a check mark on the icon for the hard drive, but when I looked closer they turned out to be everywhere! here's a screen shot of what they look like:
http://www.theamazingrolo.net/marks.jpg
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What on earth are they about?! Any ideas? They kind of bug me, to be honest.
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First, empty the Trash, if possible.
Triple-click anywhere in the line below on this page to select it, then copy the selected text to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C:
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Launch the built-in Terminal application in any of the following ways:
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☞ Open LaunchPad and start typing the name.
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The output of the command will be a number. It's automatically copied to the Clipboard. Please paste it into a reply.
The Terminal window doesn't show the output. Please don't copy anything from there.

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Application moved error and question marks for dock app icons - related?

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