Aperture – The Pesky Wrong Thumbnail Problem

This entry is part 22 of 27 in the series Aperture Work-flow

I have seen this issue and question on how to resolve it so much lately that I thought I would share a tidbit from my Aperture File Management eBook. If you have been using Aperture heavily for a while you have probably run into the problem where Aperture associates the wrong thumbnail image to a master image. I don’t know the exact conditions that cause this to happen but I can tell you it is definitely some sort of concurrency bug in Aperture. Based on my non-clinical research and my own experience this issue rears it’s ugly head when you are trying to do a whole lot at the same time within Aperture. Like running an import and moving files into/out of a project into another one, generating previews, etc.

When this problem happens logical courses of action rarely resolve it like “rebuild thumbnails”. Sure try that first but most likely you already did or you wouldn’t be searching the internet for an answer. I have personally done just about every bizarre gyration including diving into the Aperture library structure and database internals to figure out how to MAKE aperture fix this or at least find a way to fix it myself instead of starting from scratch.

By a wide margin the easiest way to make Aperture fix this problem while not getting rid of your images/edits/metadata/etc by starting over on the effected images is to create a new empty project. Copy the images in the project with the problem to the new empty project by selecting them and then option dragging them to the new one. Now just to be save do not do anything while the images are being copied. When it is all done check out your “new” project and if everything looks honky-dory then delete the old project hook, line, and sinker.

The reason this works is that the problem stems from sqlite database structures that are inside the project being corrupted in such a way that nothing you can do from within Aperture including “database repair” fixes them. Actually the database structures are fine – the data in them is wrong. When you copy the images to a new project all of the data structures are rebuilt one by one from scratch in the new project.

Ps. Hope this helps some poor lost souls out there.

Series Navigation«Aperture – Renaming Files After You ImportAperture – White Balance and Noise»

Share and Enjoy:

About this entry

You’re currently reading “Aperture – The Pesky Wrong Thumbnail Problem,” an entry on RB Design

Published:: 01.17.10 / 11am

Category:: Apple Aperture, Articles

Snow Leopard

The Definitive Aperture Guides

Now available! The definitive Aperture eBook series.
Get Aperture eBooks here!

joe 01.17.10 / 12pm

I’ve run several times into this problem. The easiest way for me to resolve the problem was to:

1. quit Aperture
2. navigate in Finder to your library
3. open it (right click, show package content)
4. open the affected project (right click , show package content)
5. delete the “AP.Thumbnails” file of the project
6. reopen Aperture and it will start rebuilding the thumbnails all over again and correctly

This way you would avoid the hassle of creating a new project copying everything and moving it back.

Hope it helps!

Joe

RB 01.17.10 / 12pm

Joe,

There are a lot of occasions where this does NOT fix the issue. This only fixes it if the actual database tables contain the correct information. The method I suggested seems to fix it ALWAYS.

I have a bunch of fellow photographers that I help out with issues like this and have run into quite a few situations where deleting the thumbnail files does not solve the issue – Aperture just rebuilds the wrong ones again and again.

On another note – I find the fact that Aperture continues to have concurrency related issues of a couple different flavors to be completely unacceptable given how long the product has been on the market combined with Apples Pro machines upping the concurrency game as a method to improved performance for the last few years.

joe 01.17.10 / 1pm

Ok thanks! I didn’t know!

Yes I agree the Aperture development is somehow lacking progress. Let’s hope the 3rd version will be announced soon!!!!

RB 01.17.10 / 1pm

You and me both – I have fixed the thumbnail issue with the method you describe a couple of times and was surprised when I encountered a situation where it did not work about a year ago with a friends Aperture library.

David Mantripp 01.18.10 / 5am

I had an issue where Aperture somehow associated the wrong images with the database entries. The effect was to open up a project and see the thumbnails (and previews) be overwritten by the wrong images as I watched. The metadata remained unthouched. Within the XML files I found references to both the “correct” file and the wrong one. There seemed to be no way to fix this. I eventually had to rebuild the affected projects from scratch. Ever seen anything like this ?

RB 01.18.10 / 8am

David,

I believe the copy to new project method that I outlined will fix things in your scenario. I kind of remember this was what was happening to a friends library.

David Mantripp 01.19.10 / 12pm

Ok, thanks – in the unfortunate event of being struck by the same glitch again I’ll try that.

David

RB 01.19.10 / 12pm

Let me know how it goes.

Joerg Thomas Klein 01.19.10 / 3pm

Hello,

what about the problem of overwriting the metadata of the library with the metadata written in the masters when (re-)creating thumbnails.
Is this a library problem too and how can it be solved?

Thomas

RB 01.19.10 / 4pm

Specifically for the wrong thumbnail problem that I describe – the metadata will be copied along with adjustment metadata – versions – master images – everything – but…. the structures are rebuilt from scratch and the thumbnail issue is resolved for every case that I have run into so far.

Joerg Thomas Klein 01.20.10 / 3pm

I mean not the wrong thumbnail problem but a simular one of what people say it is a library problem. E.g. in the apple discussion forum found und metadata loss. But it is not a loss but an overwriting of the library with the metadata of the masters. I have this problem too, have already checked your ebooks, but found no solution. Do you have seen this problem before?

RB 01.20.10 / 3pm

Joerg,

I have not had – nor have I seen this issue personally. I have read it on the forums but did not comment on it because I do not know anything about it.

I will try to make it happen with various convolutions to see If I can reproduce the issue and give you a clue.

Ps. A lot of stuff I read and help people with are actually self inflicted injuries – don’t count that out.

Joerg Thomas Klein 01.23.10 / 11am

If the most stuff when you help are self inflicted injuries then I don’t ask further because I don’t wish this problem to anyone.

My hope was that you have an good understanding of the library and have some ideas what has gone wrong. I’m thinking of exporting the projects and importing them into a new library but I have no idea how to get my library structure to the new library. My projects with the pictures are seperate to the sorting albums in the library.

Christopher David 02.04.10 / 11am

Holy crap! I owe you a beer bro! How did you figure that out?

A huge thanks to you RB!

RB 02.04.10 / 11am

Christopher,

You are welcome – I could use a beer after this month. The way I figured this out was tenacity – a personality trait that is sometimes good and sometimes not so good.

If you don’t have any of my eBooks on Aperture you may want to check them out – I assure you that you will not be disappointed.

Shuttleworth 02.05.10 / 12pm

I was looking in the package contents of my Aperture library, having just moved it from managed to referenced. I noticed that each images folder has a sub-folder named thumbnail, in which there is a small jpeg of the picture. However, each project also has the file you mentioned earlier, the AP.thumbnails file, and this was pretty big for each project, in fact it made up 34Gb of my 38Gb library (no previews in the library at the moment). Any idea what the AP.thumbnails actually is, and why it’s so big?

Cheers

RB 02.05.10 / 12pm

Shuttleworth,

This file could be bigger than it needs to be – if you delete it Aperture will rebuild it – It may be small because it never gets rebuild from scratch as far as I can see. So… If you make a project with a lot of images and get rid of a lot of those images the file size does not seem to change – if this is the case deleting it and letting Aperture rebuild it might make them smaller.

Shuttleworth –

You probably know this but turning off previews everywhere does not get rid of them if they exist – you must also delete them by selecting all your images and using delete preview…

Thank for the quick reply! I’d deleted the previews using your guideline on p12 of the File Management eBook, i.e. selecting all and then delete preview.

I’d shut Aperture, deleted the AP.thumbnails file in each project, and the Library went down from 38Gb to 14 Gb.

I’ve relaunched Aperture and it’s chugging away rebuilding the thumbnails, the library size is increasing a bit, it’ll be interesting to see what it ends up at.

Just a note – do not do much – like importing/adjustments/moving images around while it is rebuilding = this is a recipe for causing the issue I wrote about in this post.

Thanks for the tip!!

Philscbx 02.05.10 / 7pm

Greetings, and a huge Pre-Thanks RB before I under take this mission of wrong image result of thumbnail browser of Aperture 2.1.4 Leopard.

I have to admit, it’s possible I was moving things around a few moons ago, but haven’t used Aperture for some time on the MacPro. I don’t recall this issue in Tiger.

Then, just as you want to import a load in off the card from 1DsMkII, I freaked scanning views in a couple projects.
I simply shut it down, then referred from Apple Support.

There have been other issues seeing dotted outline of missing image? Not sure what that’s about.
Cheers

Shuttleworth 02.06.10 / 7am

Just an update, and sorry to hi-jack this topic. I let Aperture do its thing after I’d deleted the AP.thumbnails files for all projects. The library size went up from 11.50GB to 30.5GB, so 20 GB for thumbnails of 41,000 images. This seems a lot to me, about 500kB for each thumbnail if I’ve worked it out right. (I haven’t re-built the pre-views yet)

Looking in the package contents, there is still no image in the Thumbnail folder, I’m guessing this will re-appear when I build the previews.

mjturcotte 02.17.10 / 12pm

hi and thank you for your efforts. i tried opening a new project and importing the pics into it. the file has 277 photos and after 6 hours i gave up. can you tell me how long it’s suppose to take?

RB 02.17.10 / 2pm

mijturcotte – probably about a minute – sounds like something is wrong with your library or your install – try a repair by holding option+command when starting Aperture.

RB Design

Aperture – The Pesky Wrong Thumbnail Problem

About this entry

The Definitive Aperture Guides

25 Comments

Have your say

Categories

Archives

Pages

Polls

Article Series

Other posts belonging to this series