iTunes, iPhone, Aperture & Permissions Issues

If you have graduated to Aperture from iPhoto as your main photo management software, and like to share your photo library with other users thereby allowing other users to log in and launch a common Aperture library, and you use an iPhone... you may encounter permissions issues. The first sentence, as with other posts, is painfully specific to allow those of you who do not fall into this long-tail user category to save seconds of wasted life by not having to read any further.

A symptom of an unhealthy set of permissions in your Aperture library is a window popping up in iTunes announcing that a sync cannot be completed because you do not have permission. This may also occur because of permission issues with music or movie files.

Apart from selecting the problematic folder, hitting Command + i ("Get Info") and modifying the "Sharing and Permissions" settings, clicking the wheel and selecting "Apply to enclosed items", some possible solutions are:

1) Hold down the "Option" and "Command" keys as you launch Aperture. The following window will appear:

Run a "Consistency Check" (a built-in permissions check-like feature), relaunch, and run "Rebuild Now" (just for fun).

2) If you plan to share your Aperture library among users, you may consider using Disk Utility to create a sparse image disk, and save your Aperture library to it. Like FireWire drives, sparse image disks ignore permissions.

You may also notice that Aperture no longer offers to delete your iPhone pictures after syncing. First of all, best practice is to delete photos directly from the camera itself after you have verified a successful upload of images. However, like many of us I like to ignore best practice and delete directly from the application, as is possible using iPhoto. No more living dangerously, as, second, I'm unaware of any method of having Aperture delete photos from the iPhone.

If anyone know a way, I'd love to return to my reckless workflow...