Best way to split Aperture Library

This is my current setup:
Aperture 3 running on my Macbook Pro with referenced masters. Both library and masters reside on the 500GB macbook. HD space is starting to get a bit tight and now I would like to split the library into 2 (by years probably, haven't decided) and put one library (the least used) on my iMac and continue to use the MB as the primary workstation.
What is the best way to do this split? I know I can export as a new library in A3 and have it consolidate masters into library. I'm assuming when I do this consolidation it just copies the masters to the new library. This would not solve my HD space issue as the original referenced masters would still reside on my MB.
Any suggestions are greatly appreciated. Thanks

Based on what you said so far, still the best option is an external HD. You do not need to take the HD with you every place you go. When you are mobile, tell Aperture to Store Files in Aperture library as you do now. When you return, tell Aperture to Relocate Masters. It's job done. You will free up a lot of HD space and with a Referenced Masters set up you should see some performance improvements. Allan
PS you have two Allan's trying to assist.

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What is the best way to copy aperture library on to external hard drive? I am getting a message that say's "There was an error opening the database. The library could not be opened because the file system of the library's volume is unsupported".

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Kirby Krieger wrote:
Hi Shane. Not much in the way of thoughts - - but fwiw:
How is the drive attached?
Can you open large files on the drive with other programs?
Are you running any drive compression or acceleration programs (some drives arrive with these installed)?
Can you reformat the drive and try again?
Hi Kirby,
I attached the UltraMax Plus with a USB cable. The UltraMax powers the cable so power is not an issue. I can open other files. Also, there is 500GB of files on the drive so I cannot re-format it. Although, I noted I could import the entire Aperture Library. However, I do not want to create a duplicate on my machine because that would be defeating the purpose of the external drive.
Thanks,
Shane

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Usually, at the beginning of the year I create a new, clean library for iPhoto. This helps me keep my library size managable. Well, this year I forgot to do it and now my iPhoto library contains pictures from 07 and 08. Is there an easy way to split my iPhoto library? How do I create a new library with my 08 pictures? There must be a way to do it. I know what events I want to move to a new library I'm just not sure how to go about doing it.

Welcome to the Apple Discussions.
iPhoto Library Manager will copy Events and well as Albums, for further information consult the Help on the app or contact the Developer.
I have an external network drive to store the libraries so I also want to experiment with sharing those libraries with my wife
Users have consistently reported problems when using a disk not formatted for OS X (such as a NAS) with iPhoto. These issues include problems sharing, problems saving changes and others. I would not recommend using iPhoto on any disk not formatted for OS X.
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Best way to share aperture library over network on two computers?

I've read several posts about doing this and most recommend using an external HD and just hot swapping. However, is their not a better alternative? Can I not share my library over the network, or just remote connect to the other computer?
Thanks for the help!

Hi Terence and Leonie,
You can run several Aperture on the same computer as long as all Aperture are using distinct libraries.
What Aperture does is to create a simple lock file in <your Aperture library>.aplibrary/Database/apdb The lock file contains the PID of the process. So not two Aperture could open the same library (although I don't know how good they have manage the concurrent creation, locking, verification of this lock, this is a typical and difficult software engineering problem)
Anyway, I have not said that Aperture supports concurrent editing. That a file is a database or a simple text file, you have basically the same issues on network or in concurrent environment. So if the folder structure holds simple, flat text file or xml object or databases, it is still a bunch of files (this is a UNIX system by the way ).
Aperture contains more than one SQLlite file, there are some at the root folder, some under Database/apdb etc. there are also XML files that could be used as database.
Anyhow, editing a file (SQLlite, XML, txt, doc, etc.) either on a share or locally is plain similar. The drive can fail too, although much less likely than the network.
Network file edition can have a few shortcomings, but nothing that when known can be blocking.
Locking files over the network can however be tricky and depends largely on the network protocol used (NFS, SMB/CIFS or AFP just to name a few). In addition, if you import files from /Users/foo/Photos in Aperture (without copying them within Aperture), they might not be visible from another computer or only the previews, as the path /Users/foo/Photos is not "visible" from the other computer.
What really is a problem when you put a file not locally is the file system type and its features. HFS+ supports extended attributes (metadata), many other file systems support these but the API (how the software, such as Aperture, access this feature) might not be similar, in addition the amount of metadata or their structure might differ from file system to another. And this is where you might lose information.
A tool like Dropbox is pretty good at maintaining the metadata across different computers, and it has been adapted to do so for OS X specifically (and also for Linux and Windows).
The second problem is if you would have a Mac and share via SMB (the Windows share network protocol, aka CIFS on recent Windows versions) the library, SMB might not support the reading and writing of HFS+ metadata, thus data loss might occur.
Apple is just warning us of all these shortcomings, and advise to use local storage formatted as HFS+. Because even a local external disk formatted as NTFS or other file system could be a problem.
However, power users who understand the risks and limitations of a network share (in general) can create a disk image on a share (even if it is SMB). As for OS X, once the disk image is mounted, it is just like any other local hard disk, it is just "slower" especially latency wise. OS X supports perfectly disk image mounted on a share, it takes care of properly synchronising it.
Of course, due to the nature of the link between the application data and where they are stored, in case of application or OS crash, the amount of data loss could be greater than when the data are held locally.
I hope this clarify better my post.
Note: another shortcoming of having it on the network is: Aperture lock the library by creating a file with a process ID. If the same library is opened from another computer on the network, this other Aperture instance might see the lock file and could perhaps not find the corresponding running process. This Aperture instance might then decide to ignore the lock and proceed with opening the library. This might have some consequences.
But I haven't developed Aperture so I don't know how it would behave

Best way to access Aperture Library?

I have a MacPro [2008, 2.66ghz, 1.33ghzbus; 17G ram] w. 4 bays- a 1T drive in one bay is allocated to Aperture and my startup main drive is 1T and has 600G empty. I want speed & ease of access to my Library & so far have found that because it's on another internal drive, it's not all that speedy.
Would I benefit from moving the Library to the Startup Drive and working with and accessing it from there or keeping it on the other drive and doing something else? What would be a good way to go [the Library is now at 600G but contains lots of dups so I'm working my way thru cleaning it up and expect it'll be closer to 400G when through if not less]

On using referenced masters, Here's what you do -
Instead of trying to copy them and maintain the folder structure in the finder yourself... Use the normal old aperture import window.
Where it says "store files in the aperture library" - change it to a folder that you want to contain all your RAWS, and then use the "subfolder" dropdown to choose a subfolder structure. Aperture will automatically load the raws into a folder structure for you... Thus you will never need to worry about it, and you can use the same workflow as you would if you were storing the RAWs in the library.
I use "project name/" because I shoot weddings and never shoot more than 9999 shots per project.
This way when It is time to archive a project, it is easy for me to move the Masters offline to an archive drive, but keep the previews and the library online for me to look at if needed.
If you wanted to replicate iphoto's folder structure, you could do that too - just set up the subfolder structure to be "year/month/day".
It's very powerful... and seamless as well.

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I put an external drive on my Airport USB drive and put my library in a new vault last night. I know it is much slower than going direct to USB on computer. With wireless N it took about 12 hours to backup the 80gb library to a new vault on this Airport drive. Are there any issues with using the Airport USB other than speed? I know apple has issues with using time machine on this kind of setup but I don't know if Aperture has any of the same issues. My thought is that I might use this drive for additional libraries as well.
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Once I move files to external storage as a "referenced master", is there a way to move some of them back to main library on the internal drive? I'm going to move all my team sports pictures to external but would like to keep the pictures with my kids on the internal drive where they are at. But if I unintentionally move some of my kids to the external drive, how do I "un-reference" them and move them back?
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Hello, all — I've been using Aperture for several years now, but I've been doing so with no structure or planning. Now I've got an Aperture library that is nearly 300G, mostly unorganized, and slow — and I'm ready to clean things up. My general question: "What is the best way to organize Aperture Libraries/Photos?" Right now I've got one library and about 90% of the photos are stored "inside" Aperture. I'd like to free up space on my internal hard drive and move my library (or libraries) and photos to an external drive.
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"Should I store my libraries on my internal or external drives?"
"Should I store my pictures inside our outside of Apertur?" and
"Starting with the library I already have, how should I go about making these changes?"
I know these are all big topics and a lot to ask, but I'm feeling lost and would like at leat some pointers to get started. I guess I should also point out I do limited editing of my pictures: the vast majority are downloaded from my phone and kept as-is in Aperture.
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So my big questions are:
"Should I have more than one library?"
That's up to you of course but there are pros and cons to multiple libraries.
The biggest con is that by splitting up your library you cannot search all your images at one time. So say you split by year, you can no longer get all images of Aunt Sally at Bobby's Birthday through the years. You would need to go into each year library, do the search and export the images.
Also having multiple libraries can complicate housekeeping.
On the plus side the libraries are smaller but there isn't a lot to be gained from smaller libraries. Aperture is able to handle fairly large libraries.
"Should I store my libraries on my internal or external drives?"
Again it's an individual choice but as a rule you want your libraries on the fastest drives you have. Up until the release of USB 3 and Thunderbolt that meant the internal drive, now you have more latitude.
So old system I say keep it internal. Newer system, if you can afford the USB 3 or Thunderbolt drives it's your choice.
"Should I store my pictures inside our outside of Apertur?" and
Again it's a users choice. Keeping the originals managed (inside the library) greatly simplifies backups. You backup the library the originals are backed up also. If the originals are referenced you need to make separate provisions for backing them up.
A plus for having referenced originals is that you can store them on slower media and save space and money. Again before the new Macs this was more of as issue as you would want the library on the internal drive for speed but to save space you could put the originals on slower external drives.
The other reason to store the originals referenced is if you need to access them with another application. If they are managed and in the library it really isn't feasible to access them from another application.
"Starting with the library I already have, how should I go about making these changes?"
Well step one is to make sure you have good working backups of everything. There is a good chance you will not get this right on the first shot and being able to just wipe everything out and start again will be both a big help and a great stress reliever.
Other then that you need to decide how you what the final setup to look. You could make some teat libraries and try out different setups to see what feels better for how you work. This will also let you play around with the commands and steps you will need to do when you do it for real.
Good luck and if you take nothing else away from all this pay attention to the part about having backups before you start. You will be very happy you did.
regards

Best way to implement Aperture on a shared Mac

I'm looking for some suggestions on the best way to implement Aperture on my work computer. It's a 15" MacBook Pro Retina. Since I don't own the laptop, can I just run Aperture from an external drive in case I have to give the computer up on short notice? I have a 1 TB Lacie drive (USB 3.0) that currently holds a copy of all of my images. I don't currently have Aperture, so this would be a completely new install.
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For example, if I have to give the laptop back could I simply hook the Lacie up to a new MacBook, install Aperture, restore the latest Vault backup and be up and running?
That would work.
Make sure, your Lacie drive is formatted MacOS X Extended (Journaled), and set the "Ignore Ownership on this volume" flag. I assume, you are using different account names on the two macs.
You should be able to download Aperture again to your new MacBook, if you use the same AppleID.

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I am trying to rebuild my iPhoto library and noticed my backup contains aliases (pointers?) and not the actual file. What's the best way to rebuild my library?
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Best way to split Aperture Library

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