Newbie Question: Best Way to Set Up Library and Photos?

Question

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.
So my big questions are:
"Should I have more than one library?"
"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.
THANKS!
Mark

Answer 1

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