I’ve been holding on to Aperture as long as possible, but finally had to make the move. I have Aperture 3.6 and the 11/5/2015 version of LR CC. I’ve always kept my photos as managed files in my Aperture library on the hard drive of my mid-2012 MacBook Pro Retina with back up vaults on external drives and just kept my Aperture library small enough that I could do that (about 27,000 images).
I used the LR plug-in to migrate the Aperture library to Lightroom on an external drive. When that was done, I spot checked that the images were still in the correct LR folders and that they looked good. Because I didn’t have enough room on hard drive I then deleted my Aperture library from the hard drive. I then drug the Lightroom Masters, Lightroom Catalog Previews (lrdata) and Lightroom Catalog (lrcat) in to the Pictures area of the hard drive. That all seemed to go well. I started viewing the images and all was good. I then disconnected the external hard drive and restarted the computer. Now, when I looked at the images, all I could see was pixelated (in many cases, horribly pixelated) images with a message that photo was missing. I opened the external hard drive again and all was good. I disconnected the external hard drive, restarted the computer and now LR doesn’t recognize the catalogs on the hard drive at all. I deleted and then re-imported the LR Masters, LR Catalog Previews and LR Catalog. Now LR doesn’t recognize the catalog on either the computer hard drive or the external hard drive. The CR.2 images are all there in both places, but LR doesn’t recognize the file hierarchy at all and I’m not keen on dropping some 27,000 files back in to their folders one at a time.
What did I do wrong and how do I fix it so I can get on to the brutal task of re-editing the images? Thank you in advance.