Import Time for 45,000 Photos

Question

Hi there.
Im new to Mac and also Aperture. 
I'm importing my 45,000 photo colection that I have stored on an external hard drive into Aperture.
I am setting it up as a referenced library and am using a 1TB drive i grabbed from my PC which is now in a USB3.0 casing.
I have a rMBP 2.6Ghz with 8MB ram.
I have tried a couple times to import and then walk away and it seems to be choking.  The computer I think is going into sleep mode (its plugged in) and then when I wake it up..it begins to pick up importing again.  At least I think it is....I cant really tell and the "processing" status window isnt really giving me useful information.
My question is how long something like this should take to import?  Ive tried a couple times and even left it overnight.
Also should I maybe try importing in smaller batches?
Any help would be great.
Thanks!

Answer 1

Eric-
Organize into Projects first and import one Project at a time like Léonie suggested; it should only take a couple of minutes to import each Project. Personally I set 500 as my arbitrary maximum number of images in each Project but your mileage will vary. Experiment to see what number of maximum images in a Project may or may not slow your particular setup/workflow down; my guess is that 500-image projects will be fine unless maybe you are shooting a D800 or if there are scan files involved.
Please let us know how many image files of what size you find you can import in a reasonable time (less than 5 minutes). E.g. X files per minute at a certain file size. I am curious. You may find 1000-image-sized Projects work fine; or you may find that the import rate slows significantly when Project size exceeds 150 image files.
Before importing you should:
• Back up the originals before importing into Aperture. This is an absolutely essential step to a safe workflow.
• Decide what keywords to batch-apply to each Project.
From an earlier post of mine on this topic:
Projects should be just that: individual-shoot (i.e. time) based projects rather than some kind of organizing tool for all the architectural photos or whatever. For performance reasons personally I keep each Project under 500 20-MB images, making a second Project if the shoot is large. E.g.
110829_KJones_Wed_A,
110829_KJones_Wed_B,
110829_KJones_Wed_C, etc.
One or more albums will always organize the KJones wedding pix together anyway. All three Projects (110829_KJones_Wed_A, 110829_KJones_Wed_B, 110829_KJones_Wed_C) would have the keyword "KJones_Wed" applied to each pic, which allows an Album "KJones_Wed" to be quickly created at any time.
The way I look at it conceptually:
Aperture is a database (DB), and each image file lives in one Project.
Albums are just collections of Pointers that point to individual image files living in one or more Projects. Since they just contain pointers, albums can be created or deleted at will without affecting image files. Very powerful. And Albums of pointers take up almost zero space, so they are fast and do not make the Library size grow.
Keywords can be applied to every image separately or in batches. Keywords are hugely powerful and largely obviate the need for folders. Not that we should never use folders, just that we should use folders only when useful organizationally - - after first determining that using keywords and albums is not a better approach. Most of the time folders are inappropriately used.
As one example imagine the keyword "flowers."  Every image of a 100,000 images Library that has some flowers in it has the keyword flowers. Then say we want to put flowers in an ad, or as background for a show of some kind, or to print pix for a party, or even just to look for an image for some other reason. We can find every flower image in a 100k-image database in 2 seconds, and in another few seconds create an Album called "Flowers" that points to all of those individual images.
Similarly all family pix can have a keyword "family" and all work pix can have a key word "work." Each individual pic may have any number of keywords. Such pic characteristics (work, family, flowers, etc.) should not be organized via folders.
So by using keywords and albums we can have instant access to every image everywhere, very cool. And keywords and albums essentially take up no space in the database.
Another (IMO poor) approach would be to use a folder "Family" for family pix, a folder "Flowers" for flowers pix and another folder "Work" for work pix. IMO such folders usage is a very poor approach to using an images database (probably stemming from old paper or film work practices). Note that one cannot put an image with family in a field of flowers at a work picnic in all three folders; but it is instant with keywords.
As an aside note that empirically many users find that even though the Aperture DB can contain hundreds of thousands of image files, no problem, individual Projects should be limited in size for speed reasons. Personally I limit Projects to a maximum of ~400 to ~500 RAW NEF files, but hardware and workflows vary.
HTH
-Allen