Referenced Photos

I am trying the PSE 9 trial and coming from a background of using Aperture, but I am quite comfortable with Bridge, and have used the Lightroom 2 and 3 trials. Aperture has two ways of handling photos: managed or referenced, and I prefer 'referencing' them rather than importing them into a managed library. From what I can tell with the Organizer that comes with PSE 9 it appears to want to place/import the photos into a library. Am I understanding this correctly? And if so, is there a way to avoid this and just reference the photos rather than manage them? Any assistance would be appreciated.
Thanks
Lee

Unless you are importing from iphoto, the organizer is just a database and doesn't copy/move your photos. In the case of iphoto it's set up to duplicate them to avoid any potential problems caused by writing to the iphoto library from outside iphoto.
However, organizer is a DAM program like iphoto or aperture, rather than a browser like bridge. Once your photos are in the organizer, you must manage them there if you want it to keep track of them. Moving them in the finder, for instance, will cause it to stamp its little feet and complain about not knowing where they went.

Similar Messages

How to copy referenced photos from dodgy external drive to new drive when whole file will not copy due to error 36.

My external WD portable passport drive must be dodgy because I can't back it up or clone it or copy 3 of my 22 photo files to a new portable drive. I get error 36 as I attempt all 3 processes. I have copied my iPhoto library, iMovie events and most of my aperture referenced photos to the new drive. But cannot copy 3 files that contain the corrupted files showing just a grey triangle. I cannot delete or move to trash the corrupted raw photos.
How can I copy to the new drive any photos that aren't corrupted (grey triangle instead of photo or a photo that's just coloured horizontal broken lines) so I can then reconnect the referenced photos after copying them?
I am on late 2008 MacBook Pro with lion,
Many thanks
Bw

I've worked out how to copy and reconnect individual photos.
But can see that what's happening is that heavily edited raw photos are taking ages to load. Or not loading at all. And if opened go to the spinning wheel for 5-10 minutes. I am wondering whether to compress these or take them back to the originals or any other ideas would be very welcome.
Thank you
BW

How to move referenced photos to external hard drive and maintain "faces"

I created an iphoto library on an external hard drive. I chose not to copy imported photos to iphoto (reference instead) under iphoto preferences. I dragged a large folder of photos from my internal hard drive to iphoto and spent countless hours adding faces to all the photos. I now decide i want these pictures referenced from the external drive too, not the internal. I moved the file of folders to my external drive and of course iphoto now cant find these referenced pictures. I do "find photo" and point to where i moved these photos on the external drive and all works, until i close iphoto and restart it. (in other words, iphoto doesnt remember the new location i pointed to)
Is there a way to move the referenced photos to the external drive and still have iphoto faces work correctly?
thanks

This is just one of the many reasons that a referenced library is not recommended with iPhoto
it has been reported that File Buddy - http://www.skytag.com/ - can help resolve the broken aliases - I have not used - as always backup before messing with your iPhoto library
LN

How does Photos handle Aperture referenced photos

In order to keep my Aperture's working library at a reasonable size, I keep the latest 3 years of photos locally and move older photos onto my NAS drive. Aperture keeps previews and can reference/open the original files as soon as I have mounted my NAS.
How will the new Photos app handle these? If they simply disappears from my library, I am stuck with Aperture or have to move over to Lightroom.

The Photos.app can handle referenced images. And it can consolidate referenced images into the library.
I don't know, however, if Photos can work with referenced photos on a NAS.
Test it with a small library before you migrate.

Lost referenced photos in Aperture -- need help with re-associating them

When I first started using Aperture 3, I elected to have my existing iPhoto pics as referenced, rather than managed files.
I recently replaced my hard drive (for a bigger one to hold all those photos...). Now I find that whenever I click on a referenced photo, I get the error message:
Versions with unavailable master files cannot be exported. The selected master image is either offline or not found. Please reconnect it and try again.
I understand I can go do File>Locate Referenced Files.
Given that they haven't been moved from their original location (I assume within the iPhoto library), is there a way to automatically re-associate all of them? I've got about 10,000 photos like this now and can't possibly track them down one by one.
In the dialog window that pops up, the lower box is where you point to the original files. I can select "iphoto library" but don't see any way to do this easily for a lot of photos. Am I missing something?
Thanks.

Oh, man -- THANK YOU! That last bit of info did it for me.
So to summarize for others that may be struggling with this:
[1] Create a smart album to locate all the referenced photos (I used the keyword "iphoto original" which Aperture applied to all my iphoto pics when I starting using Aperture).
[2]Select all photos in the album (cmd-A)
[3] File>Locate Referenced Files
[4] In the upper panel highlight one photo.
[5] Use spotlight to locate where that photo is on your hard drive.
[6] In the lower panel navigate to the location of the photo
[7] Click on the "reconnect all button at the bottom.
Aperture then took about 5 minutes reconnecting all my referenced photos.
Excellent. Thanks!

Data loss -- managed photos mis-badged as missing referenced photos

I always import all photos as managed photos, and never use referenced photos. Yesterday, I noticed that the last 29 photos from a group of 96 photos imported Feb 18 were badged as "The referenced image’s master file has not been found."
Indeed, although I had worked on many of these images in Aperture shortly after importing them, I could now only view a large but low-res thumbnail.
Weirdly, when I right-click on one of these images and select "Manage Referenced Files..." I get a message that "The selection doesn't use any referenced files." I get the same message when I select "Manage Referenced Files..." from the File menu with the entire project selected.
Using the Finder, as well as the find and locate commands in the terminal, I have verified that the missing images are not on my main or backup hard drives (unfortunately, I use a simple rsync script for backup, and I didn't discover this problem until after the deletions had propagated to my backup).
The other 67 photos imported at the same time (same import group) seem fine, and, using the Finder, I can locate all of them in the Aperture library.
To test one user error scenario, I imported some test photos into the Aperture library and then relocated the masters to the desktop. I then quit Aperture, deleted the photos on the desktop, and relaunched Aperture. As expected, the test photos had the same "The referenced image’s master file has not been found" badge, but when I right clicked and selected "Manage Referenced Files..." I got the expected dialog, unlike when I select the same option for the missing 29 photos.
Any ideas what went wrong?
G5 iMac Mac OS X (10.4.8)

Thanks for responding...
It sounds pretty odd. First try to rebuild the
database...as was suggested (Option>CMD on launch of
Aperture).
I will try this eventually. But I want to get some insight first, in case this could create more problems than it solves. I am also holding off on updating to 10.4.9 for the same reason.
This might help. If not, try to make an
adjustment on one of the images. This will force the
thumbnail to redraw. If the adjustments aren't
available for that particular image, then the image
is really offline somewhere.
I am unable to make any adjustments on these images.
I assume you went into your Library "Show Package
Contents" to confirm they are missing. If not, try
that.
Yes, the images are not in the folder with the other images from that import. Further, I used the unix 'find' and 'locate' commands to search my entire hard drive and backup drive, and the images were not found.
Can you Export the image?
That was how I first stumbled on this problem -- I tried to export and got an error message that "Versions with unavailable master images cannot be exported."
The weird thing is that when I try and get the 'Managed referenced files...' dialog, Aperture claims that "The selection doesn't use any referenced files" -- that tells me this data loss might be the result of a bug and not user error.

2 iPhoto Libraries, one referenced photo source

I know people have been looking for a safe way (a method that will not corrupt the iPhoto library database) to share libraries for a long time. It appears that until Apple decides to make changes to allow this to happen, its not possible to do it without risking database corruption.
But is is possible to share a dataset of referenced photos (where the original photos are not stored in iPhoto's library, just links to the photos that are stored elsewhere) using two libraries? In other words, two libraries pointing to the same dataset of original photos?
I know this would mean that photo edits made using one library would not be available in the other. But this approach would allow multiple members of the family to share the same set of family photos, and have their own libraries, with separate albums, edits, etc.
I'd appreciate hearing thoughts about this (or better yet, if someone has actually done it!).
Cheers,
Bill

Possible - of course it is
but it is a really bad idea - at this time iPhoto simply does not handle referenced libraries well
As you point out this method would only share the originals and not of the edites, metadata changes, projects, etc
And it means a complicated time and consuming import scheme of different people adding originals to the shared photos library and then notifying all others of what they had done and each and every user importing all of those photos to their library - which means that most likely everyone whould have a different set of photos within a srt time
But the biggest issue if that the path can n=ever change (unless you hack the database of each iPhoto library that is referencing the photos) so upgrading hardware, computers or replacing defective devices becomes much more difficult
LN

Help with the complexities of a mix of managed and referenced photos

When I first started using Aperture instead of iPhoto, I elected to keep my iPhoto photos in their existing location (as referenced files) and all subsequent photos that were imported into Aperture were (obviously) managed by Aperture.
I am hoping to start freeing up some hard drive space by deleting some photos.
[1] If I delete a referenced photo in Aperture, does the photo also get deleted in iPhoto, or does the reference to it merely get deleted from Aperture? I'm assuming the latter is true. If I delete the photo in iPhoto, I'm guess in a preview thumbnail remains in Aperture.
So, what's the best way to accomplish this?
[2] I'm ultimately hoping to get a new MacBook Pro and am thinking since I'm now an Aperture afficianado, I'd like to move all my photos to aperture as managed files since I might ultimately put my burgeoning photo collection on an external drive.
Is there a way to change the referenced iphoto files to managed Aperture files (thereby completely bypassing iPhoto altogether)?
Thanks for your help!

Thanks. That is pretty straightforward. One follow-up question:
Do I then select all the photos in Aperture and do Colsolidate Masters (assuming Aperture will skip over those pictures that are already Managed), or do I have to select only my iPhoto referenced files?

How to filter / find referenced photos by where they are located

Ok guys, I have been going round the bend with this one.... I've been through all of the Filter options in Aperture 3.4.3 several times over the last week trying to find for some way to get Aperture to only show referenced photos that are located on a particular external hard drive (EXT1) / within a particular sub-folder.
In addition to some Originals/Masters being located on EXT1 I also have some referenced photos located on my start-up volume (OSX).
The desired function: I would like to move all of the photos (and video files) that Aperture is referencing (along with the existing folder structure) from within /EXT1/Photos/ to another folder (either also on EXT1 or maybe on to another drive (EXT2), it doesn't really matter where).
Why do I want to do this? I want to check whether there are any 'lost' files that shouldn't be inside /EXT1/Photos/ that Aperture is for some reason not referencing. If I move the files that Aperture is referecing away from their current location then the things that are left over would either need importing into Aperture, or moved eslewhere, or maybe even deleted. Some such files might have been put there by other applications, or by me accidentally, or more likely that Versions of them have been deleted from the Aperture library but the Orignals/Masters were not moved to the system Trash...
I've gone through 5 pages of google results, trying all of the keywords that I think might be relevant, searched many posts in macrumours forums as well as here, but I can't find an answer to what I thought would have been a simple question.
Under File > Locate Referenced Files Aperture can tell me which files are located on each Volume, but from here there is nothing that can be done with the results :-( being able to search my Volume and file path would be very useful to me.
If I've missed something obvious then sorry, but I've gone cross eyed with lack of sleep tonight I thought I'd throw the question out there in case someone knows whether this is type or search criteria is not possible, or if I'm just missing something obvious!
Thanks in advance,
Adam

My next question, which I can post a new topic for if it's suggested, is "can you safely delete the RAW file in a previously imported RAW + JPEG pair?". I did some research into this a few weeks ago but didn't uncover a proper way of doing this, but someone suggested that you can simply just set the JPEG to be the Original/Master within Aperture and then delete the RAW file within Finder.
That is a cumbersome workaround. I cannot really recommend it - I tried it myself. Aperture will complain over and over again about the missing RAW files and even repairing the library will ot fix it. The safer way to remove the raw files from the pair would be to export the jpegs as master and to reimport them, then to delete the older imported versions after lifting and stamping any edits you may have done already.
Aperture's built-in feature to keep only raw for selected images is to allow to import only the jpegs first, browse the images, and than add the raw later for the images that you want to have at a better resolution.
From the Aperture Manual:
If you import only the JPEG files and then later decide you want to download the RAW files as well, you can have Aperture identify and import the RAW files that match the JPEG files in your Aperture library.
To import the RAW files that match the JPEG files in your Aperture library
Choose “Matching RAW files” from the Import pop-up menu.The Include pop-up menu appears below the Import pop-up menu.
Do one of the following:
To import all matching RAW files regardless of rating: Choose “All matching files” from the Include pop-up menu.
To import all RAW files matching JPEG files that are unrated or better: Choose “Unrated or better” from the Include pop-up menu.
To import all RAW files that match the current rating: Choose “Current filter” from the Include pop-up menu.
Regards
Léonie

5272 Referenced Photos NOT LOADING! I'M BEGGIN' PLEASE HELP!

Yes, all my photos that I have imported (as referenced images) can't be edited.
The photos are in an external HD where I have all permissions to read and write. As a matter of fact, I could edit them before I upgraded to Aperture 1.5.2. However I must confess that I'm not sure if this is the reason why I can't edit; Aperture only indicates the "Image Loading" message on the Adjustments HUD.
Is it possible to revert to a previous version in Aperture? Any other ideas as of why this is happening!?!?

Hi David,
Thank you for your suggestions. I have partly figured out what is causing this problem. The referenced files are not connected properly so a simple reconnection should solve the problem, right? wrong. If I connect a new volume with or without importing photos, my referenced photos get all jumpled up. Please read along.
It's weird, but I will try to explain here.
I work with 4 drives:
1. Mac HD (MacOS Extended Journaled)
2. WinXP (NFTS) (not writable)
3. BackUp1 (FAT32) - External --> I have my ref photos here
4. BackUp2 (FAT32) - External
When I import referenced photos from the first time, there's no problem I can see the images and edit them. However, if I disconnect that device and connect another one, the referenced images point to another volume, NOT THE CORRECT ONE.
For example, yesterday I reconnected all my photos in BackUp1 and everything was fine; images were correctly referenced to this volume. Went home happy and thought my problems were solved. At home, I connected a USB stick and copied some photos in Finder, that's it; didn't open Aperture or anything else. Then later, when I opened Aperture and I connected my BackUp1 drive, the photos that I had just reconnected at the office were referrenced to BackUp2, unable to load them!
It has happened before that sometimes, instead of referring to BackUp1, the photos are referenced to WinXP!! (where I don't have any photos).
Any ideas??
Thank you.

Help! Problem with Aperture referenced photos after I updated to iPhoto 09

I updated my iPhoto library to iPhoto 09. Then I rebuilt my Aperture 2.1.4 Library.
In Aperture, when I try to edit a referenced photo imported from iPhoto, it cannot be found because it is on an unmounted volume. It is conceivable that I previously moved the original iPhoto Library to "Backup" drive – the one the referenced image is pointing to according to Aperture, then copied it to "Sally" drive – the one that iPhoto has no trouble finding, but Aperture is not pointing to.
I thought I could "manage" the referenced files and point Aperture to the correct folder within the iPhoto library – I can navigate to the folder and file, but the "Reconnect" and "reconnect All" buttons are disabled.
Does anyone have any idea how to get Aperture to reconnect to the iPhoto library? I hope I don't have to re-import the library into Aperture - that would be a nightmare!
Thank you,
Francis.

I imported my iPhoto 08 Library a while ago, using the Aperture Import iPhoto tool, choosing to "Store files in their current location" (the iPhoto Library, on Sally drive).
Much later, I had to re-jig my hard drives, renaming "Sally" to "Backup" and "Backup" to "Sally".
The iPhoto Library is on the new Sally drive and iPhoto has no trouble accessing it.
Aperture thinks the iPhoto Library is on Backup drive (which used to be called Sally). I'd like to get Aperture pointing to the iPhoto Library on Sally.
Sorry about the Sally/Backup madness, I thought I'd be detail things as much as I can.
Thanks,
Francis.

Is there a way through aperture to move all of my referenced photos onto a new hard drive while maintaining the current file structure and still keep them as referenced files.

I just want to migrate all of my work (all photos are referenced) from one drive to another and have my aperture library start working off of my new larger hard drive.

Depending on how your folder hierarchy is organized you might be able to do this with file->relocate masters and one of the options of folder organization that is provided but... if you have complicated hierarchy that Aperture will not reproduce then you can just copy all the entire folder hierarchy to the new drive using finder and then use file->locate masters to reconnect them to Aperture like this...
Aperture 3 – Locate Referenced Files « RB|Design
It's actually a bit easier if the old folder hierarchy/drive is disconnected when you do this for a few reasons.
RB

IPhoto 08 exclamation points due to referenced photos. Have reverted back to Managed, trashed problem images, and want to rebuild library or create new library. However, Originals folder contains aliases of deleted images.

1. Will broken images in Originals folder hinder making a backup copy, rebuild, or other attempts at repair? I have Time Machine, never used it, and don't know when when iPhoto became referenced library (due to bad advice) 2. Is it OK to delete broken aliases from the Originals folder (white squares with arrows, jpeg tags, and a Quicktime logo)? 3. Would it make sense to select undamaged images in the Orginals folder for copying to a new library? I am cleaning up Events and exporting healthy photos from iPhoto before trying to copy the entire iphoto library folder. Thanks for your help.

What do you mean by "broken images"?
Never delete anything from the Originals folder, ever.
Try
Download iPhoto Library Manager and use its rebuild function. (In early versions of Library Manager it's the File -> Rebuild command. In later versions it's under the Library menu.)
This will create an entirely new library. It will then copy (or try to) your photos and all the associated metadata and versions to this new Library, and arrange it as close as it can to what you had in the damaged Library. It does this based on information it finds in the iPhoto sharing mechanism - but that means that things not shared won't be there, so no slideshows, books or calendars, for instance - but it should get all your events, albums and keywords, faces and places back.
Because this process creates an entirely new library and leaves your old one untouched, it is non-destructive, and if you're not happy with the results you can simply return to your old one.

Aperture 3 not referencing photo files after reload

Using Aperture 3. Scrubbed hard drive and restored system. Moved files back from backup Reloaded A 3 from original disk, it remembered categories, albums, etc. but not thumbnails. Photos stored as files not in Aperture library. help Aperture find photos without loosing all my albums, etc.

You'll need to run File->Locate Referenced Files..
Bassically select all images in Aperture that are listed as having a missing or offline master then run the command.
You might want to take a minute and read up on the command in the uer manual before runing it.
regards

How do I change 'original' photos to 'referenced' photos in Aperture?

New to Aperture, I mistakenly imported photos into Aperture believing they were 'referenced', and I applied a lot of metadata.
Then I discovered they were 'original', not 'referenced'.
Is there an easy way to switch them to 'referenced', and not lose my metadata?
I need to keep the no. of photos on my laptop to a minimum, therefore I cannot store all my images in Aperture. (I probably should have gone with light room, since I hear it does this natively.)
Thank you,
Gina S

When you import a digicam file into the Aperture Library, you tell Aperture where to store it. If it is stored inside your Aperture Library package, it is referred to as "Managed". If it is stored outside your Aperture Library package, it is referred to as "Referenced". Aperture makes it easy to store your imported files on whichever directly-mounted storage device you want, and also easy to change the storage location at any time.
Once they are imported, your digicam files are called "Originals" in Aperture-speak. (In the manual, they also use the out-dated term "Master".)
For a quick review of the parts of Aperture, look here. I think you'll find it helpful.
Metadata is Image-specific. It remains with the Image, regardless of where you tell Aperture to store each Image's Original.
Lastly, to save space on your system drive, you might consider, as an alternative to referencing some (or all) of your Originals to an external drive, moving your Library to an external drive and leaving all your Originals managed. I have run Libraries off external drives for years.
Aperture program: on system drive
Your Library: either on system drive or on (fast) external drive
Your Originals: either in your Library (managed) or elsewhere (referenced), almost always on external drive.

Referenced Photos

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