My internal drive on my laptop is filing up fast with Photos. So I was thinking of moving my aperture library to an external FW800 drive. First, how do I go about doing it and how will performance be?
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Moving Aperture library to external drive
- Thread starter puckhead193
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I've done this twice now and it is fairly easy. I organize my photos by year and use a y-m-d naming system to my projects. I just moved 2012's photos and gained a full 100 GB of space on my HD. Just select the projects you want moved, go to File>Relocate Originals for Project and then select where you want them sent. On my External HD I have folders named "Aperture Masters 1996-2010" and "Aperture Masters 2011-12" with a subfolder for each year. That way I can locate the projects more easily rather than going through a huge folder of pictures. I name my projects using the y-m-d system and a name for the particular event, so I chose subfolder format>project name and Name format>Original File Name. Depending upon the number of photos it may take a while to move all of the the photos. The photos will now have the badge indicating that they are now referenced and not managed files. I have no problem going back and working on any of these photos for PP work. You can double check this process by searching on http://www.apertureexpert.com. That's what I used to hep me through this process. Hope this helps. Good luck.
By doing it this way the files will be stored on the external drive so I can clear up space on my internal drive? Can I view the photos if I'm not connected to external drive?
Yes and Yes. Aperture saves a preview jpeg and any "directions" (what you do in post-processing) on your laptop HD, The original picture in whatever format (RAW, etc) is kept on the external HD. You just can't change or work on the image that is on the external HD unless you're hooked up. I disconnect my external HD when I travel with my laptop and have no problems viewing the pictures or showing my family.
You can view the preview images which remain in the library. In preferences you can select the size of the preview images. If you make them large you don't loose resolution but you save more space with smaller previews. You can change the size later but it will take time to regenerate them all.
If you move the originals out of the library be VERY careful to never access them outside of Aperture. Also be sure your backup system is getting these files, you'll want a multiple redundant backup.