I have diagnosed the cause of the problem I discovered yesterday. It has nothing to do with write-only files (although those will cause other problems and that is a bug that should be fixed): it is the fact that the image files have no extension. I got into this mess by importing the images by reference and leaving them were they were and then consolidating them and selecting the Move option.

To recover:

1. Open the Aperture library package with control click and select Show Package Contents

2. Find the affected project, open that package, and drill down to the individual image folders

3. Open the folder for an affected image and look for the file ending in .apfile. Open that with an XML editor or a text editor. Here is one:

Notice that the extension field is blank. And the imagepath and name fields have the file name without an extension.

4. Change those to the filename with the correct extension.

5. Change the item called extension from blank to JPG or whatever the extension should be. I used upper case because that is what Aperture uses.

6. Save and close

Here is my example fixed:

7. Rename the original file in the image folder by adding the correct extension (.jpg in my case)

8. Repeat for all affected images

9. Find the Aperture application icon and command option double click. Aperture will launch and ask you if you want to rebuild the library. Click Now and it will do its work. Not rebuilding the library will not do any harm, but if you don't rebuild it then the database is out of sync with the apfiles and the broken images will still be broken.

This seems to fix the problem for me, but I have simply replaced my library and files with back up copies now.

Tags: Aperture, Recover, Importing