Aperture Thumbnail Bug

posted June 2, 2009 by daniel

Apple's Aperture is a great photo management and adjustment program, but there's one bug that really bothers me. Somehow two photos in a project will display the same thumbnail, which means one photo has the wrong thumbnail. Updating the thumbnail for that photo switches the thumbnail on the other photo. Rebuilding thumbnails, rebuilding the library, or deleting AP.Thumbnails doesn't fix the issue; the only workaround I've found is to export the master file, re-import, lift & stamp metadata, then delete the first file. As you can imagine, this is a hassle to repeat for each file with corrupted thumbnails.

Update

I've written a python shell script that fixes duplicate thumbnails. It needs to be reworked a bit to speed it up and I'm also trying to convert it from a shell script to a regular Mac application so it's easier for people to use. I have no GUI programming experience on Mac though, so the learning curve has been steep and it may be a while before an app is ready. Anyone more familiar with Interface Builder wants to give me some advice, send me an email.