The raw portion of a referenced master got separated from its jpeg pair when I was relocating originals. Can I recombine the raw and jpeg pair?

Question

Hi, I'm a fairly new Aperture user and have just started storing my photos on an external hard drive. An error message appeared when I was relocating originals of a project. It stopped relocating at one image, saying that the jpeg file did not exist. I found the raw file name under the new project folder that I was relocating it to, but it's jpeg pair did not move. The file names look identical except one ends in .JPG and the other as .NEF. I tried to combine originals, but I got the same error message and when I looked at the files the raw now had (1) attached to it, whereas the jped didn't. The Aperture window started to close unexpectedly many times. I tried Repair Permissions and Repair Database and that seemed to stop Aperture from closing unexpectedly, but the raw and jpeg  pair are still in separate folders. How can I get them paired up again or does it matter? I'm using Mac OS X and Aperture version 3.4.5.
Thanks,
sophie

Answer 1

If you don't take care when choosing the location for referenced images, you can create some problems for yourself.
From an operational perspective 'Managed' images means Aperture will take care of the image file storage for you, 'Referenced' means you will take care of it yourself.
There are a number of things that may have happened but this is what I think is most likely:
If you shoot a lot of photos with the same brand of camera, eventually you'll end up with duplicate file names, for example two different files called DSC_1234.NEF. If you attempt to store these in the same folder yourself, worse case scenario is you may inadvertently overwite one of the files. If you use Aperture to relocate, you'll get one of the files with a new name of DSC_1234 (1).NEF.
So your first step is to figure out what these files really are. Are they duplicates, or are they different files with the same name, and do they each have a matching .JPG
Aperture has the tools to fix up the problem, but you need to confirm what the problem is first.
If you don't have many of the (1) files, it may be worth continuing your 'relocate' to subfolders - making sure your subfolder hierarchy doesn't cause duplicate names to be stored together. Then when everything else is stored correctly, address the problem images by moving them to where they should be, with the right name and the JPG/NEF pairs together.
You can then search for missing files in Aperture and use the 'Locate Referenced Images' to reconnect them with Aperture.
Andy