DVD
Aperture 1.5: The Hazards of Referenced Masters -- Archives on DVDs
2006-12-14
The introduction of referenced masters in Aperture 1.5 came to many people with a feeling of relief. I can keep my masters where I want them to be! I can burn masters to DVD for archiving! I can use all those Firewire drives to store my images! In other words, I can keep on working the way I used to work: manually organizing storage and applying a cataloging application to that storage so that it is possible to find things.
As people who have been emailing me are finding out, there are hazards to using referenced masters. Aperture is not a cataloging application like iView: it's a librarian and a workflow tool. And using it like it is a cataloging application is going to result in problems.
The difference between a library and a catalog is important. A catalog is part of a library and simply works as an index, telling you where things are. A library actually holds the things that are referenced by the catalog. In the case of Aperture there are two options for the library: either store the images in the same place as the catalog as managed masters and have Aperture do the work, or store the masters externally in other places as referenced masters and you do the work. What work? There's nothing to do. Right?
Let's say you have been shooting for years and have diligently been burning everything to DVDs and cataloging them with Aperture. The day comes when you want to upload all the five star images in your collection to pBase. You create a smart album for the whole library and make it select the five star images. All the thumbnails appear and you select them and go to export them. But:
Well that is because the disk with the images on is not in the drive. But which disk to use? Control-click on an image and try to open in the Finder helps a little:
But that is only the information about one image and I have hundreds spread across many DVDs. The Referenced File Manager is more of a help:
It at least shows me the volume names of the images I have selected, so I know which disks to put in.
But wait. To export all of my hundreds of five-star images in one go I must mount all of the DVDs that contain those images at the same time! So if I have five DVDs that contain the images, I need five DVD players all plugged into my computer at the same time. The same is true of Firewire disks. Unless I can mount all of them at once, I cannot export a selection of images that spans them.
There are two possible solutions. The first is to make the images managed just for the export and then relocate them again when done. That is easier said than done when the media is read-only. The second is to split the export up into chunks so that each chunk only uses one DVD. An equally large pain because I have to do that manually: there is no filter that lets me chop up the images into groups by storage volume.
I have described one of the hazards of referenced masters. You do have work to do, you may just not realize it yet.
As people who have been emailing me are finding out, there are hazards to using referenced masters. Aperture is not a cataloging application like iView: it's a librarian and a workflow tool. And using it like it is a cataloging application is going to result in problems.
The difference between a library and a catalog is important. A catalog is part of a library and simply works as an index, telling you where things are. A library actually holds the things that are referenced by the catalog. In the case of Aperture there are two options for the library: either store the images in the same place as the catalog as managed masters and have Aperture do the work, or store the masters externally in other places as referenced masters and you do the work. What work? There's nothing to do. Right?
Let's say you have been shooting for years and have diligently been burning everything to DVDs and cataloging them with Aperture. The day comes when you want to upload all the five star images in your collection to pBase. You create a smart album for the whole library and make it select the five star images. All the thumbnails appear and you select them and go to export them. But:
Well that is because the disk with the images on is not in the drive. But which disk to use? Control-click on an image and try to open in the Finder helps a little:
But that is only the information about one image and I have hundreds spread across many DVDs. The Referenced File Manager is more of a help:
It at least shows me the volume names of the images I have selected, so I know which disks to put in.
But wait. To export all of my hundreds of five-star images in one go I must mount all of the DVDs that contain those images at the same time! So if I have five DVDs that contain the images, I need five DVD players all plugged into my computer at the same time. The same is true of Firewire disks. Unless I can mount all of them at once, I cannot export a selection of images that spans them.
There are two possible solutions. The first is to make the images managed just for the export and then relocate them again when done. That is easier said than done when the media is read-only. The second is to split the export up into chunks so that each chunk only uses one DVD. An equally large pain because I have to do that manually: there is no filter that lets me chop up the images into groups by storage volume.
I have described one of the hazards of referenced masters. You do have work to do, you may just not realize it yet.
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Aperture 1.5: Burning Masters to DVD and The Referenced File Manager
2006-10-24
Now that Aperture supports image masters outside of the library (referenced masters), it is possible to store these large files on removable media. Accessing referenced masters on entire drives, such as networked volumes and Firewire drives this is straight forward: just mount the volume.
However, for write-only media such as DVDs and CDs there is a hiccup that will require a trip to Aperture's Referenced File Manager. I will burn a CD with some images to illustrate. Here are my images in the Grid view:
They are currently all inside my library (managed), so to put them on a CD I have to make them referenced with the Relocate Masters. First I put a blank CD in the drive first so it shows up on the desktop and I will be able to specify it as a destination for my masters:
I select all of my images and go to File > Relocate Masters and choose a folder scheme that stores them by date. Aperture does not split a group of files across several disks, so it is necessary to make sure that all my files fit on a single disk --easy in this case because there are only a few.
I press Relocate Masters and my files are been copied to the CD. But they are not really there yet. They are on a disk image that the Finder has created for me that mimics the CD. Here is the Finder view of this disk, all ready to burn:
So the next step is to actually burn the files onto the disk. Once I have chosen a name for this disk (Masters) and the burn is complete I have my finished disk:
Of course that's a terrible name for a disk if I were doing this for real. I'd pick something with a date in it and make sure that the disk name was unique.
But now there is a problem. If I try to do anything with the images on the CD, they are tagged to show that the master cannot be found. Not only does Aperture not have the masters in its library, but it knows that it does not know where the masters are. They are disconnected:
So where are my masters? Why can't Aperture find them? If I Iook on the CD they are definitely there:
So what has happened?
Aperture has recorded the location of the masters as being on the disk image the Finder created for me instead of on the CD I just burned. So the library references point to locations on my hard disk that no longer have the master files. Somehow I have to correct those references.
It is time to fire up the Referenced File Manager and tell Aperture where the masters really are. I'll work with just six images first, by selecting them and control-clicking:
The window that appears has two halves. The upper half shows the status of the files that are referenced. This is the "problem" half:
On the left are the volumes that the images are supposed to reside on. Clicking on a volume will bring up the selected files that were last seen on that volume on the browser in the center. Red means that they cannot be found. And on the right is a pane that details the selected image from the browser:
The lower half of the window is the "solution" half, known as Reconnect Options:
It is a standard column file browser. I can reconnect the image I have selected in the upper half to its master by using this browser and checking that the image matches. I locate the selected master image like this:
After a short delay (and a confusing one too) the Reconnect and Reconnect All buttons become enabled. If I click on Reconnect, then the status on the top half changes, since one out of five is now reconnected:
And the file name in the upper browser turns black from red. If I had to do this one at a time it would be horribly tedious. But I don't. If I select all the remaining images in the upper half, and then navigate to just one of them in the lower half, pressing Reconnect All will do exactly that and all will be reconnected with their master files:
Once repeated for all the remaining images in this project, the thumbnails look like this:
If I eject the CD, the icons change to indicate that the masters are offline, but not disconnected:
Now what if I decide that I don't want the masters on the CD any more? It may be that I have pulled this CD out of storage and want to use the images. It's way too slow to try to work with the masters this way. I simply make the images managed again by using Consolidate Masters. They are copied off the CD into the library and Aperture uses them from that location. I can pop out the CD.
But when I am done with that project I don't want the images in the library any more. I can't delete them or I will lose everything about them. I don't want to burn another CD or DVD with my masters on again -- I already have a perfectly good copy in storage.
If I try to relocate them, then it does not work:
There is a way to do it. First create a temporary folder on your desktop called Temp. Then relocate all the masters into that folder using the same naming scheme that you used on the CD or DVD. That step gets them out of the library. Next, drag that folder to the trash. Yes really. No need to empty the trash.
Select all the images in the grid view and Open up the Referenced File Manager. Select All Volumes from the list of volumes and click the Verify button. Aperture will suddenly realize that it has lost the masters and they will appear on the browser pane. Now on the lower half of the window navigate to the CD or DVD and reconnect all the images.
Once you are happy that everything is OK, empty the trash.
However, for write-only media such as DVDs and CDs there is a hiccup that will require a trip to Aperture's Referenced File Manager. I will burn a CD with some images to illustrate. Here are my images in the Grid view:
They are currently all inside my library (managed), so to put them on a CD I have to make them referenced with the Relocate Masters. First I put a blank CD in the drive first so it shows up on the desktop and I will be able to specify it as a destination for my masters:
I select all of my images and go to File > Relocate Masters and choose a folder scheme that stores them by date. Aperture does not split a group of files across several disks, so it is necessary to make sure that all my files fit on a single disk --easy in this case because there are only a few.
I press Relocate Masters and my files are been copied to the CD. But they are not really there yet. They are on a disk image that the Finder has created for me that mimics the CD. Here is the Finder view of this disk, all ready to burn:
So the next step is to actually burn the files onto the disk. Once I have chosen a name for this disk (Masters) and the burn is complete I have my finished disk:
Of course that's a terrible name for a disk if I were doing this for real. I'd pick something with a date in it and make sure that the disk name was unique.
But now there is a problem. If I try to do anything with the images on the CD, they are tagged to show that the master cannot be found. Not only does Aperture not have the masters in its library, but it knows that it does not know where the masters are. They are disconnected:
So where are my masters? Why can't Aperture find them? If I Iook on the CD they are definitely there:
So what has happened?
Aperture has recorded the location of the masters as being on the disk image the Finder created for me instead of on the CD I just burned. So the library references point to locations on my hard disk that no longer have the master files. Somehow I have to correct those references.
It is time to fire up the Referenced File Manager and tell Aperture where the masters really are. I'll work with just six images first, by selecting them and control-clicking:
The window that appears has two halves. The upper half shows the status of the files that are referenced. This is the "problem" half:
On the left are the volumes that the images are supposed to reside on. Clicking on a volume will bring up the selected files that were last seen on that volume on the browser in the center. Red means that they cannot be found. And on the right is a pane that details the selected image from the browser:
The lower half of the window is the "solution" half, known as Reconnect Options:
It is a standard column file browser. I can reconnect the image I have selected in the upper half to its master by using this browser and checking that the image matches. I locate the selected master image like this:
After a short delay (and a confusing one too) the Reconnect and Reconnect All buttons become enabled. If I click on Reconnect, then the status on the top half changes, since one out of five is now reconnected:
And the file name in the upper browser turns black from red. If I had to do this one at a time it would be horribly tedious. But I don't. If I select all the remaining images in the upper half, and then navigate to just one of them in the lower half, pressing Reconnect All will do exactly that and all will be reconnected with their master files:
Once repeated for all the remaining images in this project, the thumbnails look like this:
If I eject the CD, the icons change to indicate that the masters are offline, but not disconnected:
Now what if I decide that I don't want the masters on the CD any more? It may be that I have pulled this CD out of storage and want to use the images. It's way too slow to try to work with the masters this way. I simply make the images managed again by using Consolidate Masters. They are copied off the CD into the library and Aperture uses them from that location. I can pop out the CD.
But when I am done with that project I don't want the images in the library any more. I can't delete them or I will lose everything about them. I don't want to burn another CD or DVD with my masters on again -- I already have a perfectly good copy in storage.
If I try to relocate them, then it does not work:
There is a way to do it. First create a temporary folder on your desktop called Temp. Then relocate all the masters into that folder using the same naming scheme that you used on the CD or DVD. That step gets them out of the library. Next, drag that folder to the trash. Yes really. No need to empty the trash.
Select all the images in the grid view and Open up the Referenced File Manager. Select All Volumes from the list of volumes and click the Verify button. Aperture will suddenly realize that it has lost the masters and they will appear on the browser pane. Now on the lower half of the window navigate to the CD or DVD and reconnect all the images.
Once you are happy that everything is OK, empty the trash.
Aperture 1.5: Online and Offline Images
2006-10-09
Since referenced images can now be stored on volumes that are remote to the computer, there are times that the data will not be immediately accessible. These are offline volumes: DVDs not in the drive, Firewire drives not connected, servers not logged into, and the like. Images with a referenced master stored on an offline volume have a badge like these:
So it is easy to see that the master is not available. But where to get it? I cannot edit the image because the whole adjustments panel is grayed out. The metadata is no help because it just tells me what I know: that this image is in the Vacation project of my Blog library:
And attempting to consolidate the masters for this project gives me this unhelpful dialog:
But connect what? Which disk do I put in? There are two ways to find out. The quickest is to control-click an image and select Show In Finder:
That will get a dialog box with the missing information:
Alternately you can fire up the referenced image manager. This is a better option if you have lots of offline images because you can select them all at once and get information on all of them in one go:
The volume name of each referenced file is in the list:
And it also shows the detail for each item in the list you select so you can be sure of what you are looking at:
Bringing the volume back on line immediately restores the online status and the badges change back. Any offline image displayed in the viewer is updated too.
It is also possible to filter images on the basis of their online status. Just select File Status from the + menu on the filter panel:
and pick the option you need:
The Show In Finder trick will open the enclosing folder with the image master selected now that the volume is online. But if multiple selections are made, it will only select the primary selection, so you cannot use this to do much more than find where the masters are stored.
The loupe still works, but gives a warning that it is not working with the master:
It is using the built-in library image in this case. Once reconnected the warning goes away and the magnification is greater because the master has many more pixels than the built-in image:
I would have expected that the high resolution preview (if generated) for the image would be available to the loupe when the master was offline, but this is apparently not the case. Another missed opportunity for previews.
Offline images can still be rotated in 90 degree steps, but once any rotation is performed, the loupe gives up and will display only gray until the image comes back on online.
And of course rating and rearranging works as expected. You can move offline images between projects too. And exporting a project with offline images gives an option to consolidate into the exported project, so ensuring that all the masters are really there and portable:
Management of online and offline images is well done and pretty comprehensive. That referenced image manager, however, will need another whole article to explain.
So it is easy to see that the master is not available. But where to get it? I cannot edit the image because the whole adjustments panel is grayed out. The metadata is no help because it just tells me what I know: that this image is in the Vacation project of my Blog library:
And attempting to consolidate the masters for this project gives me this unhelpful dialog:
But connect what? Which disk do I put in? There are two ways to find out. The quickest is to control-click an image and select Show In Finder:
That will get a dialog box with the missing information:
Alternately you can fire up the referenced image manager. This is a better option if you have lots of offline images because you can select them all at once and get information on all of them in one go:
The volume name of each referenced file is in the list:
And it also shows the detail for each item in the list you select so you can be sure of what you are looking at:
Bringing the volume back on line immediately restores the online status and the badges change back. Any offline image displayed in the viewer is updated too.
It is also possible to filter images on the basis of their online status. Just select File Status from the + menu on the filter panel:
and pick the option you need:
The Show In Finder trick will open the enclosing folder with the image master selected now that the volume is online. But if multiple selections are made, it will only select the primary selection, so you cannot use this to do much more than find where the masters are stored.
The loupe still works, but gives a warning that it is not working with the master:
It is using the built-in library image in this case. Once reconnected the warning goes away and the magnification is greater because the master has many more pixels than the built-in image:
I would have expected that the high resolution preview (if generated) for the image would be available to the loupe when the master was offline, but this is apparently not the case. Another missed opportunity for previews.
Offline images can still be rotated in 90 degree steps, but once any rotation is performed, the loupe gives up and will display only gray until the image comes back on online.
And of course rating and rearranging works as expected. You can move offline images between projects too. And exporting a project with offline images gives an option to consolidate into the exported project, so ensuring that all the masters are really there and portable:
Management of online and offline images is well done and pretty comprehensive. That referenced image manager, however, will need another whole article to explain.
The Amazon Unbox
2006-09-09
Tom Merritt has experienced Unbox, the new movie download service from Amazon and he doesn't like it:
So, in summary, to be allowed the privilege of purchasing a video that I can't burn to DVD and can't watch on my iPod, I have to allow a program to hijack my start-up and force me to login to uninstall it? No way. Sorry, Amazon. I love a lot of what you do, but I will absolutely not recommend this service. Try again.
You would think that an internet retail pioneer would realize that there are no second tries, but somehow that has escaped them and they have rolled out this particularly odd way of losing customer loyalty and diluting their brand.
So, in summary, to be allowed the privilege of purchasing a video that I can't burn to DVD and can't watch on my iPod, I have to allow a program to hijack my start-up and force me to login to uninstall it? No way. Sorry, Amazon. I love a lot of what you do, but I will absolutely not recommend this service. Try again.
You would think that an internet retail pioneer would realize that there are no second tries, but somehow that has escaped them and they have rolled out this particularly odd way of losing customer loyalty and diluting their brand.
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