Designating scratch space in Aperture

You can't and don't need to. It's not Photoshop. You need to stop thinking of it as if it is. It leverages the OS correctly instead.

You don't need to designate scratch space, but you can designate where you actual originals will be stored (either somewhere on a harddrive or in the aperture library). Does anyone know if you can store them in both places at the same time and let aperture manage both of them?

techster85 said:

You don't need to designate scratch space, but you can designate where you actual originals will be stored (either somewhere on a harddrive or in the aperture library). Does anyone know if you can store them in both places at the same time and let aperture manage both of them?

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You managed files can only exist in a single Library so the answer is basically no. There are some solutions from pre-referenced files that allow your library to span drives. I've not looked at them but I assume they basically work by placing a symlink in the main library to the project on another drive and Aperture will follow the link so it will look like it's all in one place...

incphotography said:

My first question ever on a forum and I'm immediately chastized by a MacRumors "Demi-God." How friendly.

My understanding was that a scratch space could be designated to make the program work more quickly in an uncluttered space. I'm not concerned so much with file storage, but things are moving really slowly in Aperture. What can I do to speed up the works?

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Welcome to the forums!

The one annoying feature of Aperture that is turned on by default is "generate previews" -- not a big deal for 100-200 photos but when you have upwards of 25-30,000 photos, the "feature" gets a bit cumbersome. (All it does is help other apps like Keynote see the Aperture files quickly). Turn that off and life is better.

Other than that, I would max as much RAM as you can. Aperture loves eating up RAM even more than OS X. Sometimes (in the grid menu) it helps to have smaller previews (more per row/column). Not a big deal, but every little bit helps.

incphotography said:

My first question ever on a forum and I'm immediately chastized by a MacRumors "Demi-God." How friendly.

My understanding was that a scratch space could be designated to make the program work more quickly in an uncluttered space. I'm not concerned so much with file storage, but things are moving really slowly in Aperture. What can I do to speed up the works?

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I'm sorry you feel I chastised you, that was not the intention. It is simply not true that designating scratch space makes all programs faster. This is basically only true if the application is written to make that the case. This is true for Photoshop and not a lot else. Photoshop uses disk as cache using it's own algorithms so needs scratch space. Aperture simply uses memory as cache (which is what it's there for) and lets the OS deal with paging to disk. Sometimes Photoshops long history shows and this is definitely a case of that.

Scratching at the surface

This is a great question, and I think I'm going to blog this over at http://ApertureProfessional.com? I think you weren't just asking about the location and use of scratch disks a-la Photoshop, but a more important performance question.

There's no 'scratch disk' optimization for Aperture. This is partially because images can live in several places in Aperture 1.5 and later. Images stored inside the main Aperture library (managed files) or on external volumes (referenced files).

Keep in mind that the speed of your storage device will largely influence the performance of the program. Laptop users with their images on internal drives will see slower performance than desktop users, all things being equal, because a laptop hard drive operates at a slower RPM than a desktop model, and it often has lower "seek" times as well.

Best practices for keeping Aperture as speedy as possible is to keep your drive healthy. Running Permissions Repair in Disk Utility (Applications>Utilities) is a great way to start, and it's good to run regular maintenance tasks via shareware programs or via the command line.

About the RAM issue: It's always really important to have a good amount of ram for doing just about anything in a modern OS, but video card performance is very important, since Aperture renders raw files on the fly. Take two MacPro machines and give one 2GB of ram and a more powerful card and it'll outperform one with 4GB and a less powerful card. (Providing of course that you're not running a ton of applications that are demanding the rest of that ram.

Ok this a very big newbie question but I've been dieing to ask this for months

Is the scratch disk just a separate hard drive that lets u do the editing on it so the main hard drive doesn't take the load


I kno.. dumb question but idc better to ask then chill in the dark

Scratch disk

Here ya go...nice simple answer. By the way, the only dumb question is the one you already know the answer to;

Scratch disk: Space dedicated on a hard drive for temporary storage of data.

chuckstjohn said:

Here ya go...nice simple answer. By the way, the only dumb question is the one you already know the answer to;

Scratch disk: Space dedicated on a hard drive for temporary storage of data.

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AHHH i see thank u.... It all makes sense now, the hazy has lifted

But really thank u thats been bugging me(and sorry if i sounded like an a** i was just jokin around)