Aperture - External Hard Drive - Help please!

wmcy said:

I recently purchased a 27 inch iMac and a external LaCie drive. I store my raw files on the external drive. The problem is that when I try to import photos, the external drive is not an option. If I try to import the same photos in LR5, it works perfectly.

The external drive shows up as an icon on my desktop - and when I click on it, my pix files (from previous imports) are there. Any thoughts or suggestions?

Thanks.

Wm.

Click to expand...

I'm not at my mac just now, so can't check - but I think Aperture's options are to either import to the aperture library, or to leave the files where they are & reference them.

If you drag the photos to the location you want to keep them on the internal drive, then you can import them as referenced files from there. Alternatively, you could import them as managed files (into the aperture library) and then chose to relocate the files later.

There may be other options as well, but I can't think of them off the top of my head. Even if you stick to the options above, it's an extra step, but not too much of a hardship to get your file management exactly how you want it.

Hope that helps.

I have an external HD (G-Tech) that I have some of my older photos stored as referenced files to free up space on my MBP HD for my remaining managed files. As swordio pointed out, you can always move the files from your HD (managed) to the external HD (referenced) at any time. Or you could import the photos from your memory card directly into your external HD. When I click on the import button, my MBP HD shows up in the upper left hand panel in the "Inspector" portion. However, in the middle section toward the bottom BOTH my MBP's HD and the external HD show up in Finder-like fashion. Clicking on the external HD reveals all of my files of which I normally keep back ups of all of my RAW photos as well. I have my referenced Aperture photos arranged in "libraries" by grouped years to make it easier to find a photo when searching through 1000s. So I am not sure why you are having such a problem. BTW, and FWIW, when I do an import from my memory card to Aperture as a managed file, I select from the drop down menu of Import Settings>Backup location. I pick "choose", find my location on my external HD (my file is named 2014 RAW) and then also select Project name in the subfolder section. Aperture will then automatically copy the RAW files from my memory card to my external HD as a back up.

wmcy said:

I recently purchased a 27 inch iMac and a external LaCie drive. I store my raw files on the external drive. The problem is that when I try to import photos, the external drive is not an option. ...

Click to expand...

Create an Aperture library on the external drive. Then when photos are imported to the library they will go on that drive. It's currently not giving you an option to pace them to the external drive because it "importing" means into the library.

Look at Fiole -> Switch to Library
and then you have the option to make a new library and you can place than any place you like