damians personal blog

After the aforementioned library hack I couldn't see any thumbnails from about 30-45 images, and some had the even the wrong thumbnail instead. (This might be due to an error in importing from the flash card, as some images ended up having the same file name.)

Even the right-click menu entries "Delete Preview" and forced "Generate Preview" wouldn't help. The correct image appeared on double click or entering fullscreen mode, but the preview won't change. I was always looking for an option in the mouse menu, I guess I'm working too much with windows at work -- the option I sought was placed in the "Images" menu and is called - surprise - "Generate Thumbnails".

This did solve the problem with the missing thumbs, but not with the wrong thumbs. Immediately after generating a new thumb from the image it helped. But somehow it seemed to me, generating new thumbs only postponed the problem. And I could observe files having a different original name mix up thumbs repeatedly, it was the same image that got the same wrong thumbs.

So what I tried to do

• Generate Preview on all images
• Generate Thumbnails on all images
• Delete .approject/AP.Thumbnails and other AP.* files

but nothing helped. Until I found that thread in the apple forum, where the user "firstlaunch" suggests to rebuild the database. His advice is to hold [Alt][Cmd] at startup, and then rebuild. In my case, a simple "Consistency Check" did do the trick.

Compare the screenshot below:

        24.Nov.2009, 6:32 :: photo :: Permalink :: Comments (0)

© Apple Computers

The other day I had to collect the pictures of FriScènes, a local theater festival. I freed up some 20 GB on my internal hard drive, and collected about as much data of raw photos in Aperture. After the festival I created a backup of the files on my external hard drive, and copied the aperture library also to the external drive (kind of unnecessary, but you never know).

Some days later I needed to access the photos of the festival. But Aperture (v2.1.4) won't let me set the Library path to the external drive, and I couldn't copy it back on the internal either due to lack of free space.

So after some fiddling in the terminal I found a way to leave the photo files on the external drive and access them anyways with Aperture:

1. copy the .aplibrary folder and all the files in it to your internal harddrive except the .approject files
2. create a symlink on your internal drive pointing to your external drive

In my case, the commands where the following:

 cd /Users/damian/Pictures/
 cp -rv /Volumes/wd590/Aperture\ Library\ FriScenes.aplibrary .

(which I interrupted with CTRL-C when I saw it copied actual image files)

 cd Aperture\ Library\ FriScenes.aplibrary
 rm -r *.approject
 ln -s /Volumes/wd590/Aperture\ Library\ FriScenes.aplibrary/*.approject .

This works fine, though the slower performance of the USB drive causes the thumbnails to appear one after another (instead of appearing instantly when running from the interal drive.)

        15.Nov.2009, 23:05 :: photo :: Permalink :: Comments (0)

There used to be a really cool drinks & booze recipe website - today I found the url being redirected to the threadless t-shirt community, which is not really the kind of advice I was looking for. After a bit of nosing around I found the skinnyCorp being responsible for both of those websites, and it's probably just an error in the domain name resolution.

However it started me thinking about the websites I use regularly (IMDB, MacEssentials) or I have entered data which has not been saved anywhere else (Facebook, criticker.com). What if they stopped working today? The decline of web2.0-bubble, the end of the world as we know the people being born after 1990 know...

Let's hope it will continue like it was for the past few years!

        8.Nov.2009, 20:58 :: web world :: Permalink :: Comments (1)