Aperture 3 slow to import

I agree, it doesn't seem to do much for the speed, but it does at least give you some piece of mind that something is really happening. I am new to Mac and Aperture so all of my photos were just stored on a drive. I first copied them to the local drive thinking that would take the USB throughput out of the equation. I kicked off an import of 57,000 pictures just short of 48 hours ago. Thanks to the post about clicking on the dial to see status I can see that it is up to 43,000 of 57,000 so I will not abort the process. Like I say, I am new to mac's but basic hardware knowledge would tell you that 48-60 hours of constant hard drive activity is not a great approach. I am hoping that once this initial import is done, I can return to reasonable performance.

Update: Aperture 3.0.3 fixed this problem, finally. and it wasn't just a minor improvement, it's now at least two orders of magnitude faster to, for example, import from an iPhone (mostly I'm importing Nikon D3 RAW but sometimes I have iPhone photos). Previously, I had tried all three Aperture Library First Aid options, plus a bunch of things others suggested, all to no avail. When 3.0.3 came out, I installed it, did a "Repair Database" (not sure if this helped or not), and then, happiness. Finally.

Tried to follow your step. No results... Aperture 3 is so SLOW in everithing

So, I am not running AP3, but was reading through this post and thought to try the clearing of the caches as you recommended and dude, works a treat on my 2007 Macbook 13" in speeding up like everything.

I'm running AP2 and if I turn off Quick Previews(using the "P" key for anyone not sure), the browsing speed is great.

As expected though, when I turn on Quick Previews, with every photo I've adjusted, it loads the RAW file and then the adjustments made, but for viewing the photos, turning off Quick Preview is brilliant and I turn it back on if I need to adjust a photo again and then the preview updates anyway.

So, perhaps that method could work for others?

Regards

morrisan

Aperture>Preferences>Previews
*Where it says: Share Preview with iLife and iWork, say 'Never'*
*In Real-time, the speed suddenly skyrocketed*.
Thank you Matthew.

*Also unchecked: Use Embedded JPEG from camera, New projects automatically generate preview.
*Enabled Faces did not slow other tasks.

For those of you experience slow import speeds, check to see if card reader is compatible with your type of SD/CF cards.

After updating to AP3, I too was experiencing extremely slow import speeds. I then read on a different forum about older card readers causing problems with some of todays faster memory cards. After updating my card reader my import speeds are faster than they have ever been.

Your tip helped me immensely!
Thanks!