Aperture seats you at two very powerful tool benches:
- the adjustments are good for 99% of the work done to make digital negatives publishable, and
- the organizing ("digital asset management" is the term of art) is second to none.
That second part -- organizing -- gets throttled the instant you split up a Library. If you split your Library, you are (to show that this metaphor has at least one use) closing the door on a part of your Library, turning out the lights, and locking it away. No search will turn up any information in your archived Library unless you "un-archive" it. You are -- to update the metaphor slightly -- removing every bit of information in your Library from your info-grid.
This may work for you. For most users, it is not recommended. Most people are much better served keeping the Library whole, and finding ways around the problem of storage limitation (when it occurs). Aperture includes a clever, easy-to-use, reversible method for greatly and smartly shrinking the size of your Library. This is to convert your Images' Managed Masters to Referenced Masters. These are moved to a second or external drive, while the Library itself remains on your faster-accessed system drive.
Many users do this.
If, at some point, your Library gets too large for the largest system drive you can install, you can still move the Library itself to a second or external drive.
Imho, the best (fastest, smartest, easiest to administer) set-ups, in order of increasing Library size are:
- Managed Library on system drive
- Library on system drive, Referenced Masters on second or external drive
- Library on one external drive; Referenced Masters on another external drive
(This holds true even for SSDs, but then you have to make some allowances for which is your system drive.)
I recommend moving from 1 to 2, and from 2 to 3, only when your system drive has less than 20% free space.
IOW, unless you have specific reasons for archiving a Library (storage space is not among them; security is), don't do it.
This is what Frank had in mind, when, in his initial response, he provided this advice:
Of course this might not be the best solution to your problem. If you were to make the masters referenced and move those over to the external disk you could keep your library on the internal and continue to just have one library. This would be the way to go if you will be continuing to access the 2011 library.
Message was edited by: Kirby Krieger