I’ve had the strangest problem with Aperture, and I’ve absolutely no idea what went wrong. I’ve been using it for over a year, and merrily backing up to a vault on my NAS device, as referenced files. It’s always been a bit glitchy with the ‘finding’ of the masters if I subsequently want to make a change: I would do a path update, and still have the offline master warning if I tried to relocate it. The only way that I could reliably get this to work en masse was by doing a vault update – no big deal as these were sporadic enough to coincide with backup activity anyway. I should mention that, because the NAS device is noisy and slow, I only turn it on when I have to.

Anyway, the arrival of my AppleTV around the end of January has prompted a lot of looking back at old projects, editing, and metadata slicing and dicing as a consequence – smart folders organised by Faces etc. I decided over the weekend that I’d do mass ‘consolidate master file’ update over about a year’s worth of  projects, and it crashed at some stage. It’s hard to say when as I left it running overnight to do it.

The next night I decided to to the path update and vault sync, and rather than taking about 5 minutes, the sync took about 4 hours. I decided to have a look at the NAS directory structure and the vault appears to have turned itself inside out. Having read up on this a bit, if you don’t specify a location for the masters when you load the images from your camera [or some other storage], Aperture will put them inside the vault package. I’ve duly looked and it’s almost empty. I now find myself with about 5,500 pictures in two separate directories, one where the vault is, and one in the directory above. By a process of elimination [i.e., deleting them, then trying to resync, and watching Aperture delete previews from the library. I had backed them up before!] I’ve discovered these are the masters.

The naming convention is peculiar, with the files have been renamed in numeric order in the format <unknown>_nnnn.jpeg [I have a lot of RAW and a few Tif files as well] – the angle brackets are literal.

So the long-term path to recovery is to consolidate the libraries for the period of time that Aperture has been managing my imports; export them to a directory structure reflecting year, month and event, and then creating a brand new library from scratch. From now on I’ll set the image import preferences to copy the pictures from my camera to this manually assigned directory structure – something I should have done from the start.

The masters are all there, in the exploded version of the vault. It’s just that they are mixed up with pre-Aperture days images, and with unrecognisable names. This is going go take quite a while. Especially as Aperture isn’t finding everything… Oh dear…

The irony is that part of the reason I did this in the first place – the mass consolidation – was so that Apple TV would have access to the highest quality images. This is almost certainly daft: I can’t imagine that it uses anything other the previews – dumping 20 meg raw files down the wireless network for slideshows is extremely unlikely.

One last piece of weirdness: my entire library has converted itself to referenced, right across the board.

1/50 sec at F4, ISO 400 at 100mm

I’ve been toying with the idea of upgrading my iMac ever since I started to use Aperture. The spec of the original machine was always going to struggle: I maxed out the memory at 4Gb earlier in the year [it was a 2008 vintage], but it went off a cliff performance-wise. Aperture crashed a few times on the original import of my image library, and although I’m pretty sure that I got all of the wrinkles out, it was an indication of some frustrating performance issues ahead.

I gave the iMac I7 a long hard look, but didn’t really fancy having a 27″ monitor sitting on the dining table. I’d some concerns [subsequently allayed by a friend who uses one for work] about them running hot, but the upgradeability was also a potential issue. I decided [after some extended domestic discussions, it has to be said!] to move on a Mac Pro. To have comparable memory speed to the iMac, you are in pretty heady CPU territory – the six core Westmere.

In order to have at least some control over runaway costs, I decided to go for the base level of storage [I’ll look at an SSD some time next year, when the dust – of the scorched credit card – has settled], and 6 Gb of RAM. But I thought I might as well go for the 5870 GPU, as the upgrading the 5750 after the fact would be pretty expensive.

The other hard choice to be made was with the monitor. Again I didn’t fancy Apple’s 27″ beast [or the cost of it], so started looking at 3rd party kit. After a fair amount of research I took the plunge for a Dell SP2309W as I saw some pretty decent reviews for it. It’s a little bit industrial in terms of design and – rather quaintly – has that squidgy LCD that you tend not to experience anywhere outside of work these days.

The integrated camera works well enough, but I’ve hit a brick wall with trying to get the microphone to work. No great loss: I’m a very occasional Skype user, and a USB mike would be no more than a few quid if I were sufficiently motivated. Bottom line, the screen is great, and that was what it was all about for me.

So am I pleased, overall? Absolutely. Aperture is now as fast as I’d hoped for. It’s not without the odd little stutter – like trying to scroll the Faces’ list as soon as the screen loads – but you have to seek out problems, rather than be faced with them everywhere. Backing up a DVD for Apple TV was an interesting experience: 20 minutes, rather than the guts of two hours, and that was with some Aperture messing in the background as well.

1/125th sec at F9, 100mm at ISO 100

My new iPad arrived on Friday. I went for the baseline spec, partly on price, but principally because I intend using it at home [no 3G], and reckon that I’ll rotate content off it regularly enough, especially video, not to feel constrained by the capacity.

I wonder how many people up and down the UK sparked up the Times application this morning and, like me, were annoyed to find that it doesn’t include the The Sunday Times. Having had a couple of days to play with the thing, my general impression of the software is that it’s overpriced. The Times app is quite nice, but makes up for any deficiencies by virtue of having fantastic content. Its pricing policy is another matter altogether. I’m hoping that there will be some sort of in-app purchase to pick up the Sunday Times. I’m not particularly interested in reading a paper every day – which is what the £9.99 will transform into, a monthly subscription.

I’ve written before about the novelty tax that I felt consumers are being asked to pay for eBooks, and the fact that it irks me to be expected to pay more than the commonly available price [i.e., Amazon or supermarkets] just to have the dubious honour of reading an electronic copy of a book.

The iPad takes this one step further: we have a direct price comparison to draw on with an existing market, for iPhone apps. So we have a screen resolution penalty to pay on top of everything else?

Hopefully the prices will calm down in a couple of months….