Great site.

I’ve relocated my masters to an external hard drives, since my laptop hard drive is full. I can see the files on my external hard drive, and can see that my “used” disc space has indeed gone up to about 100 GB, but it doesn’t appear to have freed-up any space on my laptop. i.e. my laptop hard drive space still shows only 12 GB available/90+ GB used. Relocating the masters should have made much more hard drive space available on my laptop, but it didn’t change at all.

To go back a bit further, I bought a Pentax k7, upgrading from a Pentax istDS. I figured that I would be able to download the RAW interpreter for Aperture 2, but it turns out that the k7 RAW patch is only available for Aperture 3, AND I can only run Aperture 3 if I have Leopard. So, I bought Leopard, but realized that my hard drive only had about 5 GB available, so it was time to free some hard drive space. That’s when I found your page and incredibly helpful articles, and I relocated my master files. I’m stunned that it didn’t free any hard drive space. What on Earth am I missing?

Any help you could provide would be most helpful.

Thanks,
Aaron

With A3 there is the new sync feature that will merge the differences in two projects you use it the same way export project -> import project but choose to sync it with some new options.

You may want to check out the Organization and file management eBooks.

RB

Ken

Grab a copy of the file management eBook – seriously.

Assuming you do not use setup assistance and you just want to move everything here is what I would do.

Install Aperture
Copy your old Aperture library to the new computer.
Plug in your external
Use File->consolidate masters to bring in your referenced masters. I would probably use the copy option instead of the move option. I would also do it on various selections of images vs selecting the entire library.

When you are sure everything is fine you can get rid of the referenced masters still on the external HD.

If you have an issue you can just plug the ext drive back in to your old computer.

Ps You can search on file status to make sure you do not have any masters that are still referenced.

RB

Great Site -you’ve cleared up much of my confusion and I’ve learned alot. Thank you.

I have 2 Aperture questions in preparation for upgrading my hardware.

When I started using Aperture 2, I set up referenced masters on an external HD as I was concerned that my photos would take up too much space on my internal HD (older Imac). I am getting ready to upgrade to a new I7 with a 2TB HD. I would like to use primarily managed masters.

How do I convert my referenced masters to managed?? I believe I can fit them on my current computr, after I have deleted my rejected pictures.

Having done that I plan to ceate a vault of my library on an external HD. Once I get the new computer do I install Aperture and then restore from my vault, import (within Aperture) from my old computer or copy the library from my old computer using Finder?

Thanks for your help

I am confident that a quad core mac will blow your current solution away and you could get away with making the I/O perform with strategic placement of RAW files that you are not really using at the moment – either way it is better than what you have now. The really nice thing about the new 27 iMac is that you can use it as a display only if you need another CPU down the road.

RB

I will look into the file mgmt ebook as yoou recommend.

Your comments are very helpful.

thx…dave

Honestly I would recommend that you get a new machine first off. The intel machines blow that crap out of that G5.

Second – drobo’s and externally connected storage is not the way to go – it can be okay but not great. If you must use that machine you may be better off with the library on an internal drive and masters referenced on the Drobo.

In your workflow you may want to keep current projects managed and then use relocate to put the masters somewhere else as they become older projects – you can do that easily and fine tune what is internal and external file by file using just about any criteria.

Keep your project size reasonable but really you need to get a new machine – even a high end iMac 27 (or low end for that matter) will toast that G5 in a big big way.

My advice to people is to buy as much machine as they can envision actually using in the next 2 years. Do not buy a machine that you believe is “upgradable” for the next 5 years – that is a myth. Old machines are great as long as your needs don’t change and the software you use don’t change – if they do and your machine is more than a year or two old you are almost always better off going with the new tech. At least for now.

So… If you don’t need 8 cpu’s and 32Gig or something close now don’t buy a macpro buy a big iMac – if you need the disk space but not the ram go with the “small” macpro – you get it.

There are a couple of ideas that might help you out in the file management ebook if you don’t have it yet.

RB

I have a G5 with 4 GB of Ram, my applications are on a 250GB hard drive on the G5 and I store my pictures on a remote Drobo 2 drive system with 4 1TB drives formatted for 8TB. The drives are only 1/3 full with an Aperture single library of about 60,000 photos. This is my primary drive and the G5 is used about 95% of the time with Aperture with no other programs running in the background.

When Aperture is opened it can take as long as 15 minutes to open or to get to the first screen. When I select to work in Aperture it can take 30 minutes or more to load the library, so I have been leaving Aperture open with the library loaded. When I download photos from my Sandisk Extreme 4 CF cards (4GB) it can also take 30 minutes or more to download my RAW files from any of my 3 Nikon digital cameras.

When I try to edit, with or without my NIK software plug ins the program works ok…a little slow, but it works. After about 15 to 30 minutes I get the beach ball and it never goes away and I must force quit the program.

The AppleCare folks have told me I should use referenced files vs. a managed library, but for the reasons you outlined in your article, I don’t really want to do it. I have had Apple consultants (non-Aperture experts) and Apple Genius checkout the computer on several occasions and the computer checks out OK.

I would like any advice you can offer on how I can fix this problem, or how I can better design my system and storage requirements.

Thx….dave