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Level 1

9 points

Switching to mac, questions on best place to host reference masters

I am getting ready to switch from PC to Mac and have a question I am hoping I could get some advice on (I have a lot of questions actually, but will start with this one).

I have a large library of photos and videos and plan on getting an imac for my wife and macbook pro for me (I do the tagging/organizing and video editing).

Based on what I read, I am planning on keeping the masters on a separate drive and the aperture library on my macbook pro.

Question is, am I better off keeping the masters on the imac and access that folder as an external folder on my macbook pro for the masters, or should I use a NAS drive for them?

I have an older NAS that I can probably reformat for this purpose, but I often run into complications using a NAS (offsite backup issues, connectivity issues, can't use Time Machine, ...) and have read on the forums about people having issues writing to files on NAS's...

I have a buffalo terastation pro ii, it is about 3 years old. It is 2 terabytes. I would get the imac with 2 terabytes and the 256gig ssd drive so the 2 tera could be dedicated to media.

Thanks in advance for any advice, appreciate it.

Peter

Posted on Jun 27, 2011 6:46 PM

Best reply

CalxOddity

Level 3

729 points

Posted on Jun 27, 2011 8:25 PM

Oh boy, methinks you may be in for interesting times...

Aperture is a single-user application, so if somebody is working on images external to Aperture you could get issues with unintentional overwrites and incorrect previews. If the other user is taking copies of the images that Aperture is managing, that's okay, but not so if they're being worked on directly by another party.

Use of a NAS can be problematic. It may work for you, but the easiest approach is, as you identified, is to share the contents of your iMac hard drive (noting the potential risks described above, which apply equally to this approach or the NAS approach).

Take a look at the "more like this" posts to the right of your post to see what's happened in the past with others in this situation.

Regards,

Calx

View in context

17 replies

Jun 30, 2011 2:50 PM in response to plampione

Do note that my comments were re: the MBP with 6750M and 1 GB video RAM, not the iMac with 6750M and 0.5 GB video RAM. I do not know how much the doubled amount of VRAM affects the performance I have observed. Edits of Nikon RAW files are instant.

I can not wrap my head around the proposed Library on MBP and Masters on another computer. This is antithetical to the single-user starting setup that I suggest. Maybe you have created a new Aperture method that will work fine, I guess you will find out.

-Allen

Jul 1, 2011 12:13 PM in response to plampione

On all machines viewing the Aperture library, click 'P' to enable Preview mode.

'P' on all machines for read-only access to the Aperture library

'P' off on all machines for read/write access to the Aperture library.

This will force the Aperture user into a Read-Only mode, safeguarding adjustments on masters.

Switching to mac, questions on best place to host reference masters