Aperture 3.1.3 Referenced files

I’m having a really frustrating issue at the moment.  I have a modest sized photo library that I’m running in Aperture v3.1.3.  I have a nicely underpowered iMac with fairly small drive for storae, and as a result I have to store some of my master image files on external storage.  I have a Mybook World NAS that has plenty of mirrored storage, so I keep a lot of my oldest files there.  There are some features in Aperture to facilitate moving master files to external storage, and I’ve been running in the fashion for quite some time now.

Yesterday I was working in my Library and was having trouble connecting to some of the images.  I ensured that the NAS volume was mounted and I was able to browse the folder structure as expected.  The problem is that Aperture isn’t properly seeing the volume and is insisting that the referenced files are ‘offline’.   I’ve tried using the ‘Locate Referenced Files’ feature in Aperture, but when I’m browsing for the files the ‘Reconnect’ button never activates for me.  It remains greyed out, and if I select the checkbox to only files not found then i get no files to reconnect.  The windows says that all my files are ‘offline’ but zero ‘not found’ and therefore wont let me reconnect.

I’ve restarted Aperture, and rebooted of course making sure to reconnect the NAS volume before loading the library again.  Still nothing.

In looking at Apple’s forums, I’m not the only one experiencing this issue, and it looks like people have been complaining of this issue for months with continued radio silence from Apple support.

 

If anyone has found a fix for this or had a different experience let me know in the comments!

 

[UPDATE]: 11-4-2011 – Check my post for how I solved this issue in my setup.

http://www.kevinnoall.com/blog/2011/11/04/manually-change-aperture-referenced-files-volume/