Where do these files normally reside? Are they managed files (within Aperture Library) or reference files either on an external drive or elsewhere on your hard drive? Sounds like they may have been corrupted somehow. If you can physically find where they are housed it might help someone figure out a solution to your problem.

Thanks for your reply Joseph; even if you don’t have a solid solution, it’s comforting to know with more certainty that it’s part of a larger bug (which is what I assumed), and not just some particular problem of my system.

As for consolidating my masters… that’s not presently feasible… on a recent necessary library rebuild (one of a handful since my last post), I noted that I currently have over 400,000 photos. Obviously, when I get some time I could probably thin that out considerably, but still, it gives you an idea of how many images I’m dealing with. Currently, my system is on a 500GB hard drive. I also run Final Cut Studio on the same system (video files on external), and have a 60GB iTunes collection. Net result is that I can’t really afford the space for several hundred thousand 8-21 Megapixel images on my system hard drive.

As for re-importing the masters… the issue is happening to recently imported images just as much. It’s only that library rebuilds don’t always seem to help images I haven’t touched in a long while. So I don’t think re-importing the masters will work.

I had considered a major overhaul of the way my library is organized. Prior to Aperture 3, I primarily used ‘Projects’ as a kind of huge folder into which I placed albums. Given that I travel a lot, often a Project will often contain all of my albums and folders of every shot taken in a given country over a given time period (sometimes years). As a result, I have projects with huge numbers of images in them.

Some time ago, I read somewhere that sometimes placing the old files into new projects can remedy the false image format problem. I tried this on a small scale, and it didn’t seem to help. But I was wondering if perhaps changing my whole library into smaller projects would potentially have an effect? I’d rather not waste my time if I know it won’t work. I noticed in the way Aperture 3 it seems biased to import every new batch of photos as a project, rather than an album–I thought perhaps something in the Aperture 3 design might require smaller projects to operate smoothly. Is there any possible truth to this?

I’m also having issues with Aperture quitting during heavy image editing periods, particularly skin smoothing. I just re-start and it’s fine, but it’s a little frustrating for the system I’m running it on. At other times, it just seems a bit sluggish for no apparent reason… particularly when I’m scrolling through my pre-set adjustments in the adjustments HUD, and sometimes when I’m doing skin smoothing.

Perhaps I haven’t given you any more to work with. But if you have any further advice, it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

You use words like “sluggish”, how much RAM is your machine running? If U can afford to do so max it out (I have 12gb in mine). I work a lot of large projects in RAW exclusively and never have issues.

I have a similar question to the one above…

In mid 2010, I moved over from a 2006 MacBook Pro to a new 2010 i7 2.66GHz model. At that time, I also bought Aperture 3 to upgrade from Aperture 2. Aperture 2 worked fine… loved it.

Shortly thereafter, I started getting the “unsupported image” format on seemingly random files throughout my library, mostly JPEGS referenced to an external HD formatted to the Mac OS Extended (journaled) format. I did some hunting around on forums and got the suggestion to turn Aperture 3 to 32 bit instead of 64 bit. So, did that. I also did the full library rebuild upon start up. This seemed to fix most of the “unsupported image files”, except then I’d go back to other, older files and find other ‘unsupported image format” files here and there. I’m a photographer, and at that time, my library contained about 100,000 images.

Once in a while, however, I get the “unsupported image format” suddenly coming up on images that I’m actually working on, as I’m working on them. Usually this happens after a period of heavy editing, where I’ve done a lot of edits, particularly extensive skin smoothing and retouching. I’ll click on other images, and they will go from being perfectly fine, to “unsupported image format”. But then I’ll find other images, even in the same album, that work fine. It’s totally bizarre.

Rebuilding the library nearly always fixes this problem–except on older images. But if I start working on the older images, THEN rebuilding the library seems to fix them as well.

The main thing is, even though I have a fix for the problem, it’s a big pain when I’m in the middle of a major project and suddenly this issue comes up. It means having to stop, and wait 2 hours or more as my library rebuilds, OR trying to find an alternate project to work on that still works (sometimes this doesn’t work as nearly every image I click on suddenly becomes ‘Unsupported’), and doing the rebuild over night while I’m sleeping.

I can find all sorts of stuff on the net about this “unsupported image format” issue, but nothing that seems directly related to my issue–it has nothing to do with RAW files (which I barely shoot in), and seems quite random in it’s selection of images to choose as “unsupported”.

Also–looking on my drive, I see the files are still there. Usually. On one occasion, I noticed that some of the files on the drive that were coming up as ‘unsupported’ were actually unreadable in preview, too. I used disk utility and did a basic disc repair and this problem corrected in minutes. But now I still get the same issue in Aperture (sometimes every couple of days if I’m editing a lot, and doing lots of skin smoothing and retouching), but no sign of corruption on my disk.

This is all very strange to me, and has baffled me for the past year. Any suggestions?