So I went to launch Aperture 2.1.4 in Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6.2) today and much to my surprise, it crashed. It bounced once and tossed up the error dialogue. I did the usual things — pulled out the plug-ins from all library folders, removed the preferences, reinstalled Aperture, reinstalled the update, reinstalled 10.6.2 — and nothing worked. I resorted to the Internet and Google…
“Aperture unexpectedly quits” yielded little help, and “Aperture crashes” didn’t provide much assistance either. I finally tried “Aperture doesn’t work with Snow Leopard” and that led to a fix. Buried within the discussion section of the Aperture Users Flickr group was the solution. Tucked away inside the trial version of Aperture is a hidden installer that fixes the problem. Unfortunately, it can’t be accessed through the Mac OS X GUI; it can only be run from the command line. Here are the instructions:
- Download the trial version of Aperture 2.1.4.
- Mount the disk image, but don’t run the installer (cancel the installer if it automatically starts).
- Open Terminal (Applications/Utilities/Terminal).
- Type in:open “/Volumes/Aperture Trial 2.1.4/Packages/PluginManager.pkg”
- Installer should launch and run the PluginManager package. Follow the instructions.
- When the installer finishes, launch Aperture and it should work (it did for me).
Many thanks to Michael Nagel of the Aperture Users group on Flickr for this fix.
