Sync Aperture Library between two Macs

I know that my wife and I have quite a different artistic vision, and a different way of organizing things. You may be in the same situation.

I would be tempted to maintain a common set of referenced masters, with each person having their own aperture library, with their own versions, projects and albums. Each master would be referenced by both libraries and this should be quite manageable.

You could still transfer versions from person to the other person, by exporting them as a library and then merging into the other person's library, but unless you intend to share many edited versions, the need should be fairly minimal.

Afraid not... (yet he sighs...)

Aperture is not configured for sharing with simultaneous access, you can keep a library on an external drive that you move between machines, this ensures that only one of you access the library at a time.

Tony

csk wrote:
I apologize if this is an obvious question; I've searched this community and can't find an answer.

My wife and I currently have iMacs, and we both have iPhoto, and the problem is that we both tend to import pictures we take into our respective iPhoto libraries, but there's no way to easily sync them so we both have all pictures.

I'm intrigued by Aperture's purported "sync" capabilities. Hopefully, an Aperture expert here can tell me if AP3 has the ability to do what I described above - keep two individual copies of Aperture across two Macs on the same network in sync automatically?

Unfortunately it will be difficult to do this even with Aperture. I'm thinking the the 'sync' capabilities you heard of are Apertures merge library command.

Merging libraries is meant to facilitate what happens when a single user takes all or a part of their library out into the field and then wishes to merge the changes made when they return. So for instance I take a part of my library make changes to it, add new things to it and then merge it back into the original library. When I do the merge I have to tell Aperture which library to use to resolve conflicts. That is one of the libraries has to be made the master.

In a situation like you are describing where two independent users make changes to their respective libraries and then try to merge them which library is designated the master? If you make changes to image A in your library and leave image B alone but your wife does the opposite what should the merged library look like? As Aperture is now one or the other would have to rule.

If its just a question of images you each add independent of the other to your respective libraries you could work something out along the lines of exporting the new project from one library and importing into the other but trying to sync changes between two independent users would be difficult.

csk wrote:
...tell me if AP3 has the ability to do what I described above - keep two individual copies of Aperture across two Macs on the same network in sync automatically?

No it cannot. Aperture is a single-user app and what you are describing would require a (very expensive) multi-user app like the multi-user versions of Canto Cumulus or Extensis Porfolio.

Alternating usage of a single Library on an external drive will work but is strongly not recommended (a) because Libraries perform best on internal drives and (b) 2 users passing a Library drive around like that has high risk of catastrophic error.

What can work well, and most users should be doing anyway, is to put Masters on external drives and let each user import the pix he/she wants into his/her individual Library by reference (meaning both Libraries stay small, simply pointing to the large Master files that exist on externals). The individual Libraries will have Previews of images at a size you set; I recommend setting to the display size.

At some point in the future if you want to create a single Library you could merge the Libraries, but I recommend against trying to do that on a repetitive ongoing basis.

HTH

-Allen Wicks

For iPhoto, you could use a cool (and fairly inexpensive) app from the Mac App Store called SyncPhotos. It's a fairly simple solution that lets you sync all or some of your photos. Unfortunately, I don't believe it works with Aperture, and I haven't yet found a utility that does the same with Aperture libraries.