Aperture 3 Library

[Jony Mac]

I have iPhoto 11 and just got Aperture 3. I know they can both share the iPhoto library but is that best. My iPhoto library is 35GB and getting slow.

Does using an "Aperture 3" library have better performance than sharing with iPhoto? If so, how can I create a new Aperture Library and import all my iPhoto events.

 

[flynz4]

Generally, Once you start in A3, you will not be using iPhoto very much anymore... except possibly for some special projects such as greeting cards etc.

I suggest that you open the library in A3, and begin organizing to your hearts content. One of A3's greatest features is that you can completely reorganize your library at will. Some people organize by date/project:

2012-02-14 Valentines Day
2012-03-17 St Patricks Day Parade
2012-07-27 Olympic Opening Ceremony

Other people organize by subject theme... landscape, portraits etc.

With A3, you can move these things around at will, and easily reorganize.

Of course, you can re-import everything all over again. I suspect that you will not gain anything.

/Jim

 

[robgendreau]

+1 on what Jim said. Aperture gives you far more flexibility. Another example is that you can export a subset of photos, take them to a family reunion and edit them with a laptop, add faces, etc, and then re-merge with your photos at home.

And you could split up that 35GB library into libraries, and remerge them if necessary.

Rob

 

[Jony Mac]

Are you suggesting that I just use the unified library feature rather than creating a new Aperture one? I guess there isno benefit.

I have iPhoto events created by Project/occasion such as birthday, Christmas,vacation etc. totaling up to 255 events. I wonder how much more organized aperture will help me.

Is tagging with colors or keywords really useful. I may try and clean up photos. I keep every photo I take. Perhaps I should limit it to only the best ones. Kinda hard.

 

[flynz4]

Are you suggesting that I just use the unified library feature rather than creating a new Aperture one? I guess there isno benefit.

I have iPhoto events created by Project/occasion such as birthday, Christmas,vacation etc. totaling up to 255 events. I wonder how much more organized aperture will help me.

Is tagging with colors or keywords really useful. I may try and clean up photos. I keep every photo I take. Perhaps I should limit it to only the best ones. Kinda hard.

I migrated to A3 a few years ago... so my experience is not too recent. As I think about it... I guess I would probably use the feature inside A3 to import the pictures directly from iPhoto. This will give you a brand new A3 library with a fresh start. I would suggest using the mode where each of your "iPhoto events" will be a new A3 project. Within A3, the "project" is the basic organization element... and each photo lives in exactly one project.

You can move your photos between projects without any concern... it will simply move between them and continue to live in just one project.

You can create albums with collections of pictures from multiple projects. For example... you can create a project called "All Christmas"... and have all of your christmas pictures in that album. Albums contain "versions" of your originals. They take up essentially zero space. The originals still reside in your projects. If you edit a photo anywhere... all of the versions will be updated.

The real orgainzation begins when you rate, stack, stack pick, etc your pictures. You can also assign locations (trivial to do at the project level assuming your project is taken at approximately the same place. I personally do not use colors.. but I do use tags.

After you do all of this, you can trivially create smart albums that are instantly created with criteria such as "all pictures taken at the coast, rated 3* or better, and have at least one family member in the picture. That new smart album would take almost zero space... and as you add new projects year to year... the smart album will auto populate. From there you can have it auto make slide shows that play on your computer or Apple TV.

This is just a tiny example of what you might do once you move to A3.

/Jim

 

[Jony Mac]

Thanks for your help. I guess its nice that now the new version of iPhoto and A3 use the unified library so if I did need to use iPhoto all my work carries over.

I dont know how much I'll use stacks. Isnt that manly if I took multiple pictures in rapid speed? Whats weird is my library size is 36 GB but my masters folder is only 25GB. Whats taking up that extra space?

I already have my events geo tagged so I'll continue to do that, I just need to find a better way to organize them.

I mainly got Aperture for photo editing, to do a little bit more than what iPhoto gives. It was slow prior to when I only 2GB of RAM, but now it seems better with 8.

My last question is do I need to worry about using the vault since I store everything in the library and not as referenced?

 

[flynz4]

Whats weird is my library size is 36 GB but my masters folder is only 25GB. Whats taking up that extra space?

A3 keeps the originals (previously masters)... but it also makes previews for fast loading, and use of your library even if your originals are off-line.

/Jim