Aperture 2 Quick Tip – Referenced Masters and Previews

This entry is part 9 of 27 in the series Aperture Work-flow

Aperture Work-flow

If you have been using Aperture for more than a little while, especially on a laptop you may be struggling with storage space issues. Referenced masters to the rescue – sort of. For the readers not familiar with referenced masters a brief review is in order. With Aperture there are two options for storing the image files that you import. Option one – the default – is called managed masters. Using managed masters Aperture copies your precious original image files into it’s mysterious secret abyss never to be seen or heard from again (according to some people). In reality they just get copied as regular old files, into regular old folders, inside a special folder with a flag that doesn’t let you so easily navigate into it – in other words your Aperture library. People using laptops or with huge libraries and smallish hard drives this can become a constraint sooner rather than later. Enter option two – referenced masters – using referenced masters Aperture allows you to store the files anywhere you want, on more than one hard drive, on externals, on DVD’s (yuck!) wherever. You can choose the location of your master images as you import them or later down the road. In the Aperture import window you have three options to manage storage of your master images as you import them. In the Aperture library (managed masters), in the current location (referenced), or somewhere else (referenced but Aperture moves them to the location for you). The way that you deal with this down the road after importing is using File->relocate master… This function allows you to move managed masters out of the library to the location of your choice or to move referenced masters from one place to another. Aperture allows you to bring them back into the library as managed masters as will with File->Consolidate master… There is one other Aperture funciton that screws around with master image location, I’ll cover this later as it deserves a it’s own discussion, that function is – File->Manage referenced files. The common thread with all of these functions under the File menu is that you must select the images that you want to manipulate in the browser window before using the functions, I know that seems obvious but I see a lot of people get tripped up and confused with this one tiny little thing when trying to change over from 100% managed masters to referenced masters.

Okay, enough of the review, so where does this leave us? If you are feeling a little clostrophobic on your current Aperture machine you can easily move some or all of your image masters to an external drive using the functions just discussed. After doing so you will notice a little badge on your image thumbnails that indicate that the image is using a referenced masters. Aperture functionality will be idendtical right up until you unplug the external drive. When you do unplug the external drive that contains some or all of your master images a different little badge indicator will show up on the image thumbnails that have masters on that drive showing that the master is “offline”. When a master image is offline there are a number of things that you cannot do in Aperture with that images but there is also a surprising number of things that you can continue to do even without the master images. The usefulness of what you can do will somewhat vary depending on the size of the previews that you chose to generate or if previews exist at all. You can set up preview size in the Aperture menu under preferences. I personally use HD sized previews (fit within 1920×1920) so that all of my previews are at full resolution on my presentation device of choice – HD flat panels and projectors. So part of moving to referenced masters is learning how to manage your preview images and fine tuning this as well.

Here is a succinct list of things you can and cannot do with “offline” masters:

You cannot:

Use any of the adjustment controls – they will all be greyed out. Surpisingly you can see the adjustments made and even lift/stamp them to other images that are either on-line or managed as the adjustments are merely metadata.
Use any of the export functions.
Use any plugins
Use the email from Aperture (kind of stupid if you have previews)
Print any images that are offline from Aperture

More importantly you can:

Use Aperture slideshows as long as you have previews.
See and manipulate all image metadata including EXIF
Do anything you want to the organization of the Aperture library.
Use all of the keywording functions, so that you can someday catch up with the boring metadata stuff while you are on a plane and can’t play around for the 1000th time tweaking the contrast on that one image.
Use the Aperture JPG previews in all of the other OSX applications with the image browser. Pretty cool.

One other caveat to referenced masters – vaults will no longer backup your master image files. You will need to handle the backup and safety of your original master images using another solution (time machine, superduper, whatever).

8 Comments

Matt says

14 December 08 at 9:14pm

Great overview. It cleared up a few things for me about referenced masters. I may work it so pics of family and other projects from 2007 (and soon 2008) are referenced from an external HDD and more recent/used masters are managed on my MBP. If I understand, that method should work fine.
RB says

14 December 08 at 9:32pm

Matt,

Thanks for the kudos. I am glad that you got some mileage out of the post.

You understand absolutely perfectly – managed vs. referenced masters is not an either/or proposition. You can choose both. I do something similar on my laptop computers when I travel.

RB
Mike H says

28 June 09 at 4:27am

Hi, I think this article clears up my question in another of your posts (File Management). Anyways, I just wanted to say that I really really really wish Aperture could email images that are offline using the previews.
If they were to ad this functionality I could happily live with Aperture warning me that “this email will only be blah blah size, quality etc as it is being generated from your preview file”, because I’m a grown-up and I could make that decision and understand the consequences. Is there any good reason this is not do-able?
Note to self: send feature request to Apple.
Please continue your great work on this site!…..Mike (in New Zealand)
Michael G says

22 July 09 at 6:49pm

Is it possible to simply move the aperture library to the larger external? especially if you do not expect to be travelin alot?

And when the masters get all out of whack with the referenced images, is it easier to just re install aperture and start over? i would switch to managed now that I understand it better
Jason D says

23 July 09 at 10:33am

Michael G,

This is easy. Click Aperture from the menu bar at the top of the screen, go to Preferences and then under the General tab you will see the location of your Aperture library. Navigate to this location in the Finder and then move your library to the location of your choice. Keep in mind that putting your library on an external drive may cause some speed issues, I personally have a 1TB internal drive that I use for Aperture. If you do use an external drive, be sure that it uses a Firewire 800 or eSata connection for best performance.

After you’ve moved the library to where you want it, relaunch Aperture, go to Aperture-Preferences-General and then you’ll see a dialog box under Library location labeled Choose. Click this and then navigate to where you moved your library. Relaunch Aperture and you should be good to go with your library on a new drive.

As far as referenced images go, there are several options. I simply uise the command File-Import-Folders or Folders as projects. That seems to be the easiest. If you already have images in Aperture and you simply want to change them from referenced to managed (in the Aperture library), select the images you want, click File-Consolidate Master and then choose the option you prefer to move or copy the Master image(s) into the Aperture library.

Hope this helps. You can also browse this site. RB has the best articles on using Aperture and various picture management strategies.
Gerry (Windhoveruk) says

29 October 09 at 5:01pm

Great overview of a sound file management system, and certainly one that I will implement with an ever growing library of photographs.
Your suggestions and advise throughout your website are first rate, as is your constant help in the Aperture forum.
Many Thanks….
Gerry…..
Stuart Hubbard says

20 January 10 at 9:43am

Hi

I’m looking at using aperture to manage images for several users, so they have laptops with aperture on so that they can shoot, add, manipulate, keyword etc on the road. Once back in the office and when they have finished their edits, I’m thinking of getting them to relocate the masters to a shared drive.

I would then like to have a master aperture library over all the masters (with the edits) from several users – is this possible? Yes I can relocate the masters but the edits that they have done still sit in their aperture libraries. Is it a case of export and import on the projects?

Cheers
Stuart
RB says

20 January 10 at 10:05am

Stuart – you would be better off just having them export the project with the masters, then you can import the project and relocate the masters yourself.

Check out the File Management eBook. You may get some other ideas from that.

RB