aperturefinderphotos
I just finished importing my Aperture library into Photos using the official import process. My Aperture library used referenced masters on an external drive, and I had my external drive connected during the import process.
With my external drive still connected, nothing happens when I two-finger click on a thumbnail and choose "Show Referenced File in Finder." Any ideas?
Given your 12,000 images are 2.61 GB in total, they're about 228 kB each — is this right? and is this typical of your entire 280 GB of photos?
By default, Aperture makes previews and thumbnails to speed things up, based on the assumption that your images are quite large (e.g. 2+ MB) and loading + displaying them will take a long time.
For low resolution cameras, Aperture wastes quite a bit of space (relatively speaking)... but you can improve it somewhat...
Disable/shrink previews
If this size is typical of your entire library, you should probably disable the automatic creation of previews since they'll be pretty redundant for 228 kB images:
If you really want previews, but want them lower quality/size, then change the settings in Preferences and then make sure you select all photos, right click and "Update Preview". You might need to delete them first if it says they're already up to date.
Not much you can do about thumbnails
According to this apple article, Aperture thumbnails are 1024x768 resolution JPGs, and I know of no way of disabling their creation. For low resolution images, this is obviously pretty silly/redundant, since the speed-up will be minimal. Other than complaining to Apple (that "fixed size thumbnails even for low resolution images is stupid"), I'm not sure what you can do here. :(
I have a library of 34,000 photos which has produced 22 GB of thumbnails, an average of 680 kB per thumbnail. For your 12,000 photos 4.9 GB of thumbnails its about 430 kB per thumbnail. This overhead doesn't really bother me, because my 12 megapixel JPG images are 2-5 MB each (and RAWs are more like 20 MB), but for a library of smaller (say 2 to 5 megapixel) images, the thumbnails aren't that much smaller than the masters...
Just a warning, that according to posts like this one, Aperture will slowly regenerate your thumbnails, so while you can delete them to save space, they'll slowly come back.
If you've only tried with your smaller photos from an older camera, and your newer one has bigger files, then you'll see a big improvement in the amount of space "wasted" in thumbnails once you put the larger photos in. 280 GB of 288 kB photos seems unlikely (1.3 million photos?!) so I'm guessing you've got some much larger images in there... in which case it might be okay in the long run...
Should be easy enough to calculate the Aperture thumbnail waste from the total number of images multiplied by about 500 kB per thumb.
If you are not sure if the process is actually doing something or just stuck, you can get an idea from the following
Activity Monitor
/Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor.app
If you see something going on there, it is highly possible that it is still doing something.
If you don't see anything, you may want to check Console:
Console.app
/Applications/Utilities/Console.app
Console shows error messages that the app may have generated to give some idea on what is happening.
Note that both these are indicative and may not be 100% accurate. In the worst case you may have to import again (I would search Google for any issues with importing large iPhoto libraries before trying again)
This is a snapshot of my activity monitor, I have selected QuickSilver and it shows 59.0 MB Bytes Read and 27.6 MB under Bytes Written. This data is dynamically refreshed so you can get a fair idea of the disk usage of an app. The same for CPU. Memory may not be a very good indicator though, even if an app has frozen it may still use memory.
Best Answer
I had a similar issue, which seemed like it had something to do with access permissions. Try the following:
After I'd done that, "Show Referenced File in Finder" now works for all my images.