I would like to store my aperture library and all masters on an external hardrive (with a backup). Ideally I'll be able to only transport this external drive to work to edit photos and return home to my personal computer and continue where I left off. I've tried something similar but ran into problems with lost adjustments, etc and am wondering what the simplest method is that others have discovered.
Cheers
macbook, Mac OS X (10.5.8)
Should be very simple to do with a Managed Aperture Library on an external drive, assuming it is properly formated as Mac OS X Extended.
Ernie
Like Ernie says, it is easy to do and you should not lose adjustments, etc.
However putting the Library on an external drive will slow down operation and is therefore not recommended.
-Allen Wicks
Allen and I differ mildly on this. I would say, "It is not preferred," but if it meets your needs I have no trouble recommending storing your Library on an external drive as long as you have adequate throughput. I regularly run huge Libraries from external drives. I use newer, fast drives, connected via FireWire 800. It works well.
My recommendation is to never unmount the drive with Aperture running: shut down Aperture prior to unmounting the drive, and make sure to unmount the drive prior to disconnecting it. Also, remember that force-quitting Aperture is a very bad practice. There are operations which may take hours for Aperture to complete -- giving Aperture whatever time it needs to complete its operations is, IME, always the best way to go. In practice, this may mean leaving your external drive attached to one of your machines longer than is convenient.
Based on my experience, Allen and Kirby, I agree with both of you. I use a usb2 device and after editting ~20 photo things slow down and eventually freeze. It's particularly bad when I use lots of brushes. Is this poor performance just a USB vs FireWire issue?
To improve speed, should/could I keep a library on both computers with the masters on the external? I'm having storage issues on my MacBooks and I'm looking for the cleanest solution to edit (from work and home computers) my 10000+ photos. I'll be using the newer mb pro at work 90% of the time. But there are times I need to continue editting at home and on the road. what would you suggest?
Thanks
All the editing work is stored in the *****.aplibrary file.
THe most obvious way will be to keep it on the external drive. If you experience it is to slow with USB you could probably have a better performance with FW800. Probably not so much with FW400.
I have no experience with ***-aplibrary on external drive. Probably ist it to slowdown the editing.
The best way to edit on 2 different macs will need in my opinion some extra preparation.
Set both Aperture in exactly the same way pointing to referenced files on the external drive.
Keep the *****.aplibrary file on the HD of the mac you are using and at the end of your work copy it somewhere (may be on the same external HD where you keep the referenced masters). Before starting to work on the second mac copy this ****.aplibrary on it. You will need to do the same reversed to go back to the other mac.
This will probably give you the fastest editing but you will need time to copy the *****.aplibrary files, may be a lot of time. Even if you use a program like Tri-Backup to do the copy you will se that even if the *****-aplibrary has few changes it takes a lot of time to overwrite the older copy.
Keep projects and libraryes as small as possible, or you will waste more time coping it compared to the more speed in editing.
This is only my opinion, and I am not 100% sure of it. I'm giving it to you only as a suggestion you could try and see if it works for you.
Regards
Walter
Aperture library on external drive for multiple computers
