The Aper­ture 3.4 Upgrade Solution

Last week, Apple intro­duced Aper­ture 3.4. The good news is that it’s a free upgrade. The bad news is that it seems to make your Aper­ture instal­la­tion com­pletely unus­able. Imag­ine the frus­tra­tion of try­ing to open your dig­i­tal asset man­ager library and being com­pletely unable to see any of your pho­tos. Some of you don’t have to imag­ine it. Like me, you expe­ri­enced it. Of course, this hap­pened after you upgraded your library to the new for­mat, so you couldn’t even revert to a pre­vi­ous ver­sion. It wasn’t exactly a shin­ing moment for Aper­ture users. Apple fum­bled this update and left users exasperated.

For­tu­nately, the fix is pretty sim­ple. We’ll get to that in a moment, but this seems like a good time to remind you why your back­ups are so crit­i­cal. This seems par­tic­u­larly impor­tant in the age of dig­i­tal down­loads, since ven­dors never seem to give us a path to revert to a pre­vi­ous ver­sion. Tweet­deck comes to mind. I used to love that appli­ca­tion, at least until Twit­ter bought it. The next ver­sion they released was a com­plete bas­tardiza­tion of every­thing I loved about Tweet­deck. For­tu­nately, I kept the pre­vi­ous ver­sion before the upgrade and was able to use it until Twit­ter killed off its abil­ity to inte­grate with the online service.

Before you per­form an upgrade, make sure you have back­ups of your appli­ca­tion and your data. If some­thing goes wrong with the new ver­sion, then you’ll be able to get back to the pre­vi­ous, work­ing state of the appli­ca­tion. Also con­sider any plu­g­ins for the appli­ca­tion. If you have to re-​install instead of restore the appli­ca­tion, you may need to have your reg­is­tra­tion infor­ma­tion to acti­vate your plu­gin software.

That’s per­ti­nent for the Aper­ture 3.4 upgrade solu­tion. The good news is the fix is rather sim­ple. You have to delete your Pref­er­ences for Aper­ture. The down­side is that it means you have to recre­ate those pref­er­ences, includ­ing the pos­si­bil­ity of reg­is­ter­ing some plu­g­ins again.

To delete your pref­er­ences, you need to delete a file called com.apple.Aperture.plist. It’s located in the Library/​preferences folder.

By default, the Library folder is hid­den. You can eas­ily reveal it by open­ing the Go menu of the Finder and hold­ing down the Option key. You’ll see the Library folder appear under the Home folder once you depress the Option key. Click it to open the folder, and then double-​click the Pref­er­ences folder to open it. Once inside the Pref­er­ences folder, find a file called com.apple.Aperture.plist and move it to the Trash. That’s it.

Aper­ture 3.4 requires a data­base upgrade, so give that a moment for each Library file. Check your Pref­er­ences inside of Aper­ture and make what­ever changes you desire.

One of my plu­g­ins called Flick­r­Ex­port stored its reg­is­tra­tion infor­ma­tion in the plist file, so I had to enter my ser­ial num­ber and go through the reg­is­tra­tion process again. A bit incon­ve­nient, but no harm done. For­tu­nately, the Pref­er­ences file doesn’t affect any pre­sets or other data asso­ci­ated with your Aper­ture environment.

The prob­lem in your Pref­er­ences file may be insignif­i­cant, but it’s hard to cor­rect it with­out being able to open Aper­ture in the first place to change your pref­er­ences. In my case, it was due to a con­flict with Face­book integration.

What did we get in Aper­ture 3.4, other than the headache of not being able to access our pho­tos for a while?

• Adds sup­port for Shared Photo Streams on OS X Moun­tain Lion
• A new File menu com­mand can be used to open the cur­rent photo library in iPhoto
• Includes per­for­mance and sta­bil­ity improvements

Nice addi­tions, but no major cor­rec­tions to things that des­per­ately need an upgrade (e.g., Noise Reduc­tion). I’m actu­ally pleased that Apple has pro­vided a num­ber of updates to Aper­ture this year. I just wish there was a bit more test­ing on this ver­sion before they opened the gates for down­load­ing with no plan to restore to a pre­vi­ous version.