Comments on: Aperture Tip – Autostack

By: RB

RB — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 02:55:26 +0000

Tony – I would say that the two problems are related but are not aperture/image specific they are a general issue with that drive or some sort of data corruption issue that goes beyond what Aperture is trying to read – if a simple copy is causing issues nothing else is going to work either.

Ps. Forgot to mention I always format my drives HFS vs. FAT32 for a lot of reasons – I have had horrible issues with FAT32 drives w/ OSX – esp in the write departments.

By: tony.

tony. — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 23:37:16 +0000

Thanks for the fast response!

The largest project looks to be 2400 images (unstacked). Its family and travel photos grouped by year.

I’m using a LaCie 500gb drive with a firewire 800 connection.

Today I found a new problem. I tried making a copy of the library by simply dragging it to my other external Seagate drive. The copy failed with a finder error-36. This seems to be a common problem without solution.

I’ve checked the library for consistency… rebuilt the database…. tried repairing the external driver, all without success in creating a backup copy.

Now I’m in the process of exporting projects and re-importing into a new library one by one attempting to locate the offending image/file.

Maybe this has something to do with the viewer freezing?

By: RB

RB — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 03:15:36 +0000

This could be a number of things – the fact that Aperture freezes and needs to be restarted is a concern. The very first thing I need to understand is how many images are in a project – not an album but the actual project sizes. Less than 1000 images more than 5000 images. Just some idea.

Just want to make sure that you don;t have gargantuan projects. Then you should take a look at the drive itself – some external drives cause OSX to throw fits – check for reports of your drive on-line to see if others have issues with it. Lastly if the drive is going to sleep that can sometimes cause extremely long delays when it fires back up.

By: tony.

tony. — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 00:21:37 +0000

I like the idea you present, but its giving me fits in practice.

I’m using a MacBook pro with 3GB of ram ( a mid-07 vintage machine) with an external LaCie drive attached via firewire 800 ports. I’m migrating about 15,000 pictures from iPhoto to Aperture. I’m using managed images, so they are all in Aperture…. about 54gb worth now. When using the stack mode to compare stacked images I frequently have the viewer freeze…. Aperture simply refuses to move to the next stack of images or to the next image for comparison. I ultimately have to quit Aperture and start again.

Any idea what may be driving this performance problem? I’ve turned off all previews which helped some. I’m at a loss of what else I need to do. I’m also not clear if the issue is memory, disk space or the connection speed with the external drive.

Any help is welcome.