Previews in Aperture Necessary?

DCBass said:

Is there anything else previews are used for?

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Yes, they are used in Preview mode (which is a lot faster) and also before a RAW file is rendered as a placeholder.

If you're running out of space, why not take to opportunity to get a larger drive. 1.5 TB drives are surprisingly cheap these days

DCBass said:

Hello All,

I am starting to run out of disk space on my iMac and so I need to clear up some space. By far the biggest space hog are my photos.

With Aperture, I have it making previews for all of my photos. However, is this necessary? All of my photos are stored on my iMac, so I don't need to worry about 'seeing' photos from other drives.

Is there anything else previews are used for?

Just wanted to ask before I deleted all of them.

Thanks in advance!

DCBass

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If you have large projects, previews are going to make working with them a lot faster. I'd add an external USB drive (actually two and use one for a backup) if I were you. The SATA drive docks are reasonably priced and someone makes a dual-drive model that'd be perfect for making off and on-site backup copies.

previews are small jpg files Aperture generates whenever you import an image or change an existing one. deleting them will hardly generate any more space.

You might want to consider moving some of your master files out of the aperture library and storing separately. It took me a long time to come to a solution, what I do now is store all of my RAW files on a networked RAID mirror which also gets an automated weekly off-site backup. If I was in your position now I would look at getting one of these:
http://www.caldigit.com/CalDigit_VR/
Attaching it to the imac and moving all of your masters onto it. Only issue with this is that the Aperture Vaults do not backup referenced files so you need to back up separately.