Aperture stops responding when adding another iPhoto library

Question

I bought Aperture so that I could merge/add my wife's laptop iphoto library with her iMac Iphoto library.  I have read all the forums and tried to make sure that everything was good to go for this process.  When I try the process Aperture just stops responding every time.  I have plenty of hard drive space, plenty of ram. check the librarys with the library first aid apps, everything!!  I am mad because this shouldn't be difficult.  Can anyone help.

Answer 1

How many photos and how long did you leave it before you decided it had stopped responding?
I was testing a theroy last week and did an import for 18,000 images, but with each image going to it's project so Aperture needed to create 18,000 projects for the import.
It stopped responding and to all intents it looked like it had died. But in Activity Monitor I kept an eye on how much memory was being used and noticed this was still changing over time so I let Aperture continue (even though it wasn't responding).
After about 4 hours, it crashed with a message saying it had caused the virtual mempory page file to 40+ GB which OS X decided was excessive and force quite Aperture. The point being, for those 4 hours when it appeared to have died, it was actually still working away.
So, first I'd recommend running the process overnight to give it enough time to finish or really die. If it really wont finish, it may be related to the Aperture/Mavericks memory leaks problems that have been reported here recently.
If you are not in a hurry, you could wait for Apple to stabilise the combination and see if it then works.
Alternatively, it you want to get it done quickly, here's what I'd try:
Which ever library you want to import, back it up and then open it directly in Aperture.
Organise the projects (what were events in iPhotos) into folders, say one folder for each year. So for example you now have a 2011 folder containing all your 2011 events (projects). CTRL + Click the 2011 folder and choose "Export->Folder As New Library". This will create a new library containing just the 2011 events.
Now, back in the main library tell Aperture to import this 2011 library and see if it handles the smaller (and Aperture created) library any better. If it does, you can go to the other library and repeat for each year of photos.
If it still doesn't, I try creating a brand new library in Aperture (File->Switch to libray->Other/New) and try importing the 2011 library into that.
Essentially you are trying two things with this approach. First, to see if smaller libraries import successfully. Second, to see if the import is successful when you import an Aperture created library into an Aperture created library (rather than an iPhoto created library into an iPhoto created library)
Andy