Size of Aperture 3 Library

Hello,
I am contemplating switching from Lightroom to Aperture. I have downloaded the trial edition and I have imported 233 photos. My Aperture library is at 245.6MB. I have over 27000 images in Lightroom and my Lightroom catalog file is only 447MB. Is there something to check or uncheck to prevent the library from ballooning or is this normal. I am almost afraid to see what the library size will be if I decided to do a complete import.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
thanks in advance,
mitch

Uncheck "automatically generate previews" and limit the preview quality. Also set the preview size to the average size of your monitor at full screen.
I limit my previews to 1920x1920.
Previews are used in "quick preview mode" and when dragging things out of aperture into other programs.
Shooting raw most of the time large previews are not needed. Even though by default they are set to take up a lot of space...

Similar Messages

Trying to reduce the size of Aperture library

I have a 295 GB library and a 500 GB Hard drive.
Trying to reduce size of Aperture library, (ver 3.4.3) have deleted lots of big videos, duplicates of big videos, lots of poor quality photos, emptied Aperture trash and size hasn't changed. I don't know what else to do - I am cosidering splitting my library up into two - and keeping older stuff on an external - I like to have it on my laptop - so when I am at a show - I can show my clients, customers potential photos for purchase. I'd hate to have it all on an external.
I shoot mostly in RAW - so the files are quite large - also found 'some' dupes - and am afraid there are a lot more... Looking at the app ADD that someone suggested to see if that helps. However, if deleting dupes, then deleting trash doesn't change the size - not sure what's wrong -
I have shut down and restarted as well...
HELP

Have you emptied your OS system Trash?
The space isn't made available to any programs until you empty the system trash.
Click the Trash icon in the Dock, and then click the "Empty" button.

Vault (external) file size Versus Aperture Library (internal) file size discrepancy?

Using Aperture 3.3.1 (all my images are Referenced). I created my first vault on an external hard drive. The Vault.apvault file size is 32.8 GB. My Aperture Library.aplibrary file size on my iMac hard drive is 81.6 GB. So I am wondering if I have a full back-up in Vault or not. Seems like a large discrepency in file size. Any thoughts or help would be appreciated.

Do any Images that you don't expect show up when you filter "Photos" using the Rule "File Status" with the argument "Managed"?
If not, then close Aperture and repair your database. Instructions are on the Apple Aperture trouble-shooting page.
Does that make any difference?

Managing size of Aperture library

I am a wedding photographer and shoot 10k-12k images per month. Other than latest projects, I move all my Master files to external drives, keeping only previews on my iMac. All my master files are always 'referenced'.
My concern is that the Aperture library itself is getting too large in size, its approx 70 GB. On expanding the library ('show package content), I notice that the Previews folder itself is 50+ GB.
- Do the preview files take up so much space?
- Is there a way to reduce the size of the Aperture library itself (without splitting the library into smaller ones n shifting them elsewhere)
How do others address this issue?

Using your own words, you have a concern rather than an issue.
My advice is simply don't worry about it. It's remarkably common for people to take their working system and try to apply some preventtive maintenance to it and inadvetently turn it into a non-working system! Just look through the kind of issues raised here to see many examples.
Aperture is designed to handle the volumes with ease and if the current size is not presenting any actual problems for you, I'd just let it get on and do its thing.
Having said that, storage management and planning is important, but you aleady have the lions share of that side of things under control with the use of referenced files and external drives.
The actual library is (among other things) your index into your external drives and the images they contain.
Thumbnails and Previews are the visual element of that index used for browsing and sharing your collection.
Thumbnails are used for browsing and are not optional. So previews is where you have the most opportunity to control the size.
However, keep in mind it's a trade-off; make smaller or lower quality prieviews to reduce the space they take up (in preferences), and they potentially become usuable in fewer scenarios. Elect not to keep the previews for some (or all) images, and you lose the ability to share them through iLife/Media Browser.
Previously I had a smaller internal hard and so needed to make this trade-off, and my approach was to only keep previews for my top rated images, as these were the ones I would be sharing in slideshows and online. However being a pro, I doubt this kind of trade off would work for you. It needs to be tailored to your own usage, for example perhaps keep previews for all projects for 3 years along with those that you elect to reperesent your portfolio.
Andy

Size of Aperture Library

I was seriously running out of space on my internal drive (2 TB). Moved my "original" Apterture library (1.5 TB) to an external drive over the weekend. Made sure everything went well (performed Vault backup before and then made sure all Projects, etc transferred with library to external drive) and then moved library from internal drive to the trash. Question -- Library is/was 1.5 TB, but after trashing it I only gained back approximately 800GB on my internal hard drive (only about half of what I expected to get back). Is this common? Shouldn't I have gained back the full 800GB?
Thanks,
John

I have not seen any recent problems reported due to the size of a Library. Have you?
John Dunnigan wrote:
(And indeed, you're correct -- I should not allow a library to get that big!!).
I do recommend moving most Originals to a separate drive when a Library hits the 100 GB mark.
Do you know how big your Library would be with no Originals in it?
It's easy to make all of your Managed Originals into Referenced Originals. You could put these on secondary or external drives, and perhaps put your Library back on your system drive.
I import all Originals into my Library, and then regular relocate to an external drive all Originals older than 60 days except the Originals for 5-star Images. This works well for me -- my computer is a laptop. The administrative effort is minimal. I regularly copy the drives holding Originals. Something similar might work well for you.
Re: the unrecovered storage space. I got nothing that hasn't been mentioned, unless you have not rebooted, in which case you should. The sectors are there -- you'll get them back eventually.

Vault size vs APerture library size and related questions

My aperture library is 50GB for some 65,000 referenced pictures...how does this compare with others? To me, it seems a bit big.
Also odd. The vault backup of my libarary is 9.1GB ONLY! How come?
I think that all of my pictures are referenced.....is there an easy way to check?
If I make a new fresh library and restore from the vault, what will I loose, if anything? Will I need to reconnect pictures or anything?

that seems about right to me. what's taking up space are previews and thumbnails. afaik, the vault doesn't hold any of those, only the database, albums, projects and configuration files.
if you restore from a vault, all the previews and thumbnails have to be rebuilt. you can save a little space that way, because the thumbnail files don't shrink when you erase photos or move them to another project, but personally i don't think it's worth the time and effort.
j

Time Machine file size vs actual file size of Aperture library

My Aperture database is 74.5GB. I have a referenced library. My photos are backup up on their own using Time Machine. I also use Time Machine to backup my Aperture database. However, I noticed yesterday that the Aperture filesize on my time machine backup is only 28.3GB. I need to upgrade my hard drive and had planned to just restore form time machine backup, but I am worried about losing Aperture data. Does anyone know why there is a discrepency?
-Debbie

Johnk93 wrote:
MacDLS,
I recently did a little house-cleaning on my startup drive (only 60Gb) and now have about 20Gb free, so I don't think that is the problem.
It's probably not a very fast drive in the first place...
I know that 5MB isn't very big, but for some reason it takes a lot longer to open these scanned files in photoshop (from aperture) than the 5MB files from my camera. Any idea why this is?
Have a look at the file size of one of those externally edited files for a clue - it won't be 5MB. When Aperture sends a file out for editing, it creates either a PSD or an uncompressed TIFF after applying any image adjustments that you've applied in Aperture, and sends that out. Depending on the settings in Aperture's preferences this will be in either 8-bit or 16-bit.
As a 16-bit uncompressed TIFF, a 44 megapixel image weighs in at a touch over 150MB...
Ian

Using Reference Files - Aperture Library still larger than file storage

Still new to Aperture, and so far LOVE the metadata tagging functionality, but am troubled by the huge size of the Aperture library. Here's my stats so far, after a couple of days of importing, with no image management done so far other than assigning some metadata...
# photos managed as reference files=1175
Size of folder where reference files are stored=883MB
Size of Aperture library (.aplibrary)=1.44GB
My expectation would be that the ratio of Aperture library to reference file folder would be about 1/10. But 1.6/1 seems way out of whack. I selected all photos within Aperture and then selected "Manage Reference Files..." and all 1175 file references showed up. On that basis, I'm pretty confident that the jpegs aren't being copied into the Aperture library. But I cannot explain why the library continues to be 1.5+ times as large as the reference file folder.
This seems to defeat the purpose of keeping reference files external from Aperture.
Am I missing something, or is this to be expected? If these ratios hold, then it seems if I end up managing 10GB of photos I will incur another 15-16GB of storage requirement just for Aperture to do its thing.
What is Aperture doing with all that hard drive storage space?

By default, Aperture creates previews of all of your images. A preview is little more than a JPEG copy of the original. The size of these are determined by the settings in Aperture's preferences. When you're dealing with RAW images, the size of the previews are significantly smaller than the master image, but if you're working with JPEGs, then the previews can balloon the library to as large (large when you add up the thumbnails and duplicates) as the referenced files.
You can reduce the size of the previews, or delete them and turn them off all together if you're not sharing your photos with other iLife & iWork apps from Aperture. There are some other reasons you may find them beneficial, and this article will help you determine if they are right for you:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304499

Can I slim down the size of the Aperture Library by moving the Preview files elsewhere?

Hi all,
I have an Aperture library of almost 20,000 photos, dating back to around 2007. Almost all the master images are stored on an external drive (backed up of course), with only my recent and 'in progress' masters being stored in the library itself. Previously I have had my library split up into one library for each year, with the older years libraries being stored on the external drive where the masters are, in order to keep the size of my 'current' library down. So my current library, stored on my internal SSD, contained only photos from this year and last year, and only a few of the masters for these images. Confusing? Sorry!
Now, I recently decided to consolidate the libraries into one huge library, because it was annoying to have to switch between libraries to find older photos when I wanted them. I did this, leaving all but the recent masters on the external drives (referenced). I thought that the size of the main library would remain reasonably sized, since there were no extra masters being moved into it. However, the library has grown massively - up to over 70GB, which is huge when you consider it's on a 128GB SSD which is also my startup drive.
I'm pretty certain the reason for the huge size increase is that the Previews for all the older images are stored in the Library file, rather than anywhere else. This makes sense - they are previews, they're supposed to be able to be viewed with the external drives disconnected. So my question is this. Am I able to change the location of the preview files to be on my OTHER internal hard drive (non-SSD, much larger), so that they're still available without the external drives, but are not cluttering up my startup drive. And, if not, what should I do!?
Thanks a lot

Glad it worked, but permit, if you will, some observations:
-- Bloated Previews are a known Aperture bug, which came and went within a few updates in Aperture 3. Getting them back to the proper size is simply a elegant step to take.
-- A Preview set to your largest screen size and a quality of 6-8 should be all but indistinguishable from the Master at 72-100 dpi screen image. (Not print resolution.) I REALLY doubt you are going to loose any quality.
-- While using a symlink to stick the Previews on a HD is clever, it may also defeat the whole purpose of using your SSD. Previews are read a lot and are, I suspect, used for all adjustments at less than full resolution. (N.B. I could be VERY wrong on this.) Thus, depending on the amount of RAM on your Mac, you could end up reading and rereading your Previews over a slower link and doing this a lot. You own use will quickly determine if this is an issue or not.
I have blathered on, at length, about what I think matters for size and speed here: https://discussions.apple.com/message/17959625#17959625. Some of this may be of use.
I went through a lot of these issues when I tried to fit everything on a 128 GB SSD, so I know some of the issues you are facing. As I noted before, you really only need a Library (minus most Masters) of about 30 GB and that is with large, high quality Previews.
I actually took the SSD out and stuck it in an ancient MacBookPro (in preparation for a trip to Blighty this summer) and have not noticed a huge drop in Aperture speed. (I do miss the speed of applications launch, restart, however.) One thing that I did find that made a small, but nice difference, was keeping all of the Masters on a separate, dedicated drive. Once defragged, etc. that was very fast. Don't know if you could achieve the same results by partitioning a larger drive, but it might well be fun to find out.
DiploStrat

Aperture 3 Library size vs iPhoto Library

Hi!
I recently switched from iPhoto to Aperture and am wondering about the library size? In iPhoto the library size was bloated because it made a copy of every photo behind the scenes upon import. I got tired of that and thought that moving to Aperture would solve the problem. But, after importing most of my photos into Aperture, then comparing the size of my Aperture Library package with the size of my Photo folder in Finder that I imported from, I'm finding my Aperture library is over 100 GBs bigger!! Yikes! How did that happen?
I am running a managed library, but I thought Aperture didn't make a copy of every photo behind the scenes but rather just made versions of the master when changes are made.
Frankly, I haven't even done any editing yet, just importing. So, why the huge library size compared to the size of my Photo library in Finder? It's 186 GBs versus 85 GBs. Same photo collection. Crazy.
TIA!

No, from folders in Finder. I always have my photos in Finder too on an EHD, even after I import them to iPhoto or Aperture.

Question about Aperture library size

I am storing my photos on a secondary drive. However, my Aperture library is just as large as the original source folder even though I am not copying the images into the library.
Shouldn't the library be smaller since it only references the images from another location?

If you changed the size and quality of your preview settings, it's not enough to just "Update Previews". You will have to DELETE the old previews and generate new ones.
(That's what my findings where)
To my understanding, previews are used
- if you use the Aperture "Quick Previews" functionality
- for synching with your e.g. iPhone
- in the Media browser dialog of e.g. iWork applications
(am I correct and complete?)
In my first days of Aperture 2 I increased the size to unlimited and the quality to 12, since "of course" I wanted to see the best possible quality of my pictures.
Now I learned that previews are not used in normal Aperture workflows, so I reduced the size to the lowest possible value of 1280 and the quality to 12.
This way I reduced the size of my library (30k JPEG photos, all referenced) from 108 GB to 33 GB.

Aperture library file size ?

Hello,
I have all my pictures on a specific drive. I don't want aperture to import the files into this aperture library, i only want the files to be referenced. So when i import the pictures from the drive, i select "Store in Current Location". And it seems to be ok (meaning when i click on a file and say show in finder, it shows the drive in question), only my aperture library (even when i import files as referenced) ... increases it's size drastically, no matter whether the files are stored in the library itself or if they are only referenced ... how come? I want to avoid a 100GB aperture library file!!
Can someone explain to me how this works?
regards,
k
(i just bought aperture 3)
Message was edited by: whateveraliasidontcare

K,
Aperture stores many little JPG files for every photo that is in your library (whether referenced or managed). There are thumbnails and previews for every photo unless you run out of space or turn off previews.
Your library should not increase by the *same size* if you store a photo *by reference* as if you store managed. For a managed photo, Aperture will have your original (master) plus the thumbnails and previews. The referenced will have only thumbnails and previews. You can browse your Aperture library by right-clicking and viewing the package contents. You can then look (*but don't ever touch!!!*) at what exactly Aperture is managing. You will see pictures with the same and/or similar names are your original, but you will see they are different sizes. If you see your original, then something is out of whack.
I hope your "100GB" library was just an example. If you store by reference, you would need a LOT of photos to make the thumbnails and previews take 100 GB.
nathan

Aperture Library size different after restore from TM and rebuild Thumbnails

I have just completed an erase-install-migrate from Time Machine using Setup Assistant.
The size of the managed Aperture Library originally was 397.8Gb
After completion of the migrate back in I opened Aperture and as expected it rebuilt the thumbnails (TM does not backup the Thumbnails).
After doing this I tested the Library as far as possible and all seems well, and the number of photos is exactly the same as before (49,883).
However, the size of the library is now 357.8 Gb.
The only logical explanation (to me) is that the restore process has eliminated previews and thumbnails from photos which I have deleted over the years.
I still have a backup of the original (397.8Gb) version which I could put back with the Finder, but if the restored library has cleared years of redundant previews and thumbnails I would prefer to stay with that.
All done with Mavericks and Aperture 3.5.
Any insights very welcome.
Thanks

Just had the idea of looking at sizes in the Library package contents, and the explanation for the change in size is due to three things:
Thumbnails old: 44.95 Gb
Thumbnails new: 15.13 Gb
There is also an iPod photocache of 14.6 Gb which is not yet present in the new.
However Previews old was 27.95 Gb and Previews new is 33.18 Gb, so I assume some previews were smaller in the original Library.
Masters is 304.3 Gb in the original and new libraries.
I am beginning to feel more confident about the new library.

Aperture library size vs iphoto

My aperture library and iphoto library have the same photos in them. Photos seem to be the same size and quality (I imported all photos from aperture into iPhoto). iPhoto's library is 20GB, Aperture is nearly 60. I'm guessing that while Aperture might be a hair bigger because of the previews (default settings there), 3x the size means something is wrong.
Is there a way to rebuild the Aperture library without losing all my albums/libraries?
While 60GB isn't the end of the world, I'm trying to move my photos to my laptop. And between photos and music, I'm really pushing my hard drive's capacity. That 40GB difference is going to mean I'll use iPhoto (09) vs Aperture (2), and I'm still partial to Aperture.
Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
Message was edited by: unleashed

Thanks everyone for their help. Redoing the previews helped. I think I had the previews set to "do not limit" on my dekstop and had just pulled the aperture library to my laptop. Redoing those previews took 20GB off my library size.
I see where you're coming from with the referenced images, but for now, it just keeps things simpler for my to keep it all managed. It's a brilliant solution though, if I need to in the future I might go that route. Especially when you think about possibilities with having the referenced images on Time Capsule or something. I don't take that many photos, and I upgrade my computer every year or two. I'm hoping the laptop hard drive space will expand gradually with my photo and music library, and by the time I have to worry about it, there will be another solution.
As far as how I went from Aperture to iPhoto (Ernie), I did (from iPhoto) file > show aperture library > then pulled them all in. I know there are issues with this though, you might check the iPhoto forum if you have trouble, there are work-arounds I believe.

Reducing Aperture Library size

Sorry if this has been dealt with before (I did a search and found nowt).
I'm fairly new to Aperture, and my Library has grown to 14GB (14,000 files). All files are referenced on an external drive (31GB of referenced files). I use a MacBook Air with SSD, so I start with 56GB after formatting. There were lots of duplicate photos (because I merged my iPhoto library with some offline archives I had). So, it was time to get rid of the dupes.
I deleted about 3,000 photos, but the library didn't get any smaller. I deleted all of the previews, but that only freed up 2GB. When I regenerated the previews, it went back to 14GB. After recovering from a prolonged bout of consternation, I searched the web. It appears that thumbnails are not deleted when photos are removed. This strikes me as a bug, or at the very least, poor design. So, I went in and removed all of the thumbnails as described here:
http://brettgrossphotography.com/2008/04/24/aperture-library-slimming-the-size
After regenerating thumbnails and previews, my library was down to 6GB!
My question is: how do people on this forum deal with this unnecessary library bloat? I typically only keep a few percent of the photos from each import, so my library volume will again outpace the actual number of photos.
One possible approach is to create a new Aperture library from a vault. Because my files are referenced, it should create a new library from scratch and then generate the thumbnails and previews. Has anyone tried that? Seems preferable to opening packages and manually deleting files.
-Rick

After a weekend of investigation, here's some more info on Aperture library size:
1) I deleted another 1,000 or so photos, updated the vault, moved the library and then restored from the vault. The library size went from 6GB up to 7GB!
2) Looking inside the old library and the restored one revealed:
a) AP.Thumbnails files in the restored library were generally twice the size of the ones in the old one.
b) Looking at the AP.Thumbnails files with File Juicer revealed that the restored library had created thumbnails of the master files as well as the versions. The original library had thumbnails for some master/version pairs, but nowhere near as many.
3) I then deleted all of the AP.* files in the restored library, and got Aperture to regenerate the thumbnails. This reduced the library size to 5GB. The AP.Thumbnails files were much smaller.
So, my conclusion is that the best way to trim your library is to go in and delete all of the AP.* files, then regenerate the thumbnails. Restoring from a vault is not as effective.
Anyone have any intuitions as to why Aperture generates thumbnails for master files when there is an edited version? I'm fairly new to Aperture and have yet to see Aperture display thumbnails of masters if there is an edited version.

Size of Aperture 3 Library

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