Aperture Library too big

Hi,

Highlight the Projects or containing Folders you want make a new Libary of.

Right click on one of the highlighted items and select Export>Items as New Library

When the export dialogue appears, select the destination and name of the new library!

Whether it will make Aperture faster, I don't know - I would assume it would, but I've never had that many images.

Are you sure that it is the size of the Library that is causing the performance problems? Is it only the time that it takes to open the library that is worrying you, or is Aperture generally slow?

Tell us more about the setup of your library- referenced or managed; where is it located, the hardware you are using. I am asking all this because splitting a library is not always the best solution; it might be sufficient to relocate a part of your master files to another drive and to keep the library as one library. But to advise you on this better, we would need to know what might be the reason for the slow start up. There may be other reasons beside a large library that may cripple Aperture, like not enough RAM or too many smart albums and filters.

But to your questions:

1. To move older projects to another Library create a new folder in Aperture and move the projects you want to export to that folder. Then select File -> Export -> Folder as New Library; and you will have a new Aperture Library containing these projects. When you have convinced yourself that the export worked well, you can delete the folder from the old Library.
2. Will this speed up accessing library A? I can't really be sure, before we understand better why your library is opening so slowly. How long does it take anyway?

Regards

Léonie

Thanks for the detailed description of your system; I have to think a bit about it.

For best performance it is important that the main part of the library is on a very fast drive, connected to the fstest port you have, the system drive would be best, but right now you use that for the vault. The masters may reside on slower external drives, that is not so critical. But check, if you have your selected your fastest drive available for the main library.

I'll sign off for to night - in Germany it is now long past midnight.

Regards

Léonie

My Aperture managed library is currently 953 GB, and no such issues. However, it resides on a 1.4 TB partition on a 2 TB drive. I think your problem is not size, but may be lack of free space. I only use 7200 rpm drives, btw, in my 8 Core Mac Pro -- which drives are you using?

Ernie

Good morning, Aib,

Maybe I should start a new library on one of the internal HDs and move the Main Vault to an external drive since I update all the vaults at night when response time is not important.

That seems to be a good plan, and make sure that you have plenty of free space left on the volume that you move your main library to. And you need plenty of free space on your system drive.

Before you start to rearrange your library I would make some performance measurements to be able to compare the results before and after your reorganisation.

Next time you open Aperture launch the Activity Monitor (from Applications -> Utilities) and take notes on the real memory, cpu, disk activity.

Regards

Léonie

For good disk performance you need at least 10% free space on the disk. When your diskspace drops below 10% it will defragmenting and become slower and slower.

I defer to those with better knowledge of hardware (viz.: all those who have already replied), but I will inject what I do, which has worked well for large Libraries on much smaller and slower systems than you have.

I shoot RAW and some projects are quite big.

First, limit your Project size to 1,000 Images maximum -- 500 Images is better. Earlier versions of Ap3 had some problems reported with very large Projects. This may have been fixed.

Second, convert your Library to a mixed Managed/Referenced Masters system. Your Library should be on whatever drive provides the fastest throughput (almost always your system drive). Keep currently active Image's Masters in the Library as Managed, and relocate all the others to a second drive. Since you have several internal drives, you might experiment with putting your currently active Image's Masters on one fast second drive (leaving no Masters managed) and putting the rest of your Image's Masters on another drive (does not have to be as fast as the others).

Referencing Masters complicates backing up. That is simply one of the costs of converting to a faster set-up.

leonieDF wrote:

For best performance it is important that the main part of the library is on a very fast drive, connected to the fstest port you have, the system drive would be best,

I keep my media on a separate internal drive. Both my Aperture Library and my Masters. It's a referenced Library.

It sounds like you're saying I would have better performance if my Aperture Library was on my boot drive, which is SSD. Would this be noticeably different? All the media is not on the SSD drive.

If it is better to have the library on the SSD drive, how would I go about moving it?

With the use of a Mac Pro and a separate dedicated disk volume for my managed Aperture Library, I am using SuperDuper to do a Smart Backup periodically, which leaves me with a perfect copy of the entire Library. Anyone using a referenced master Library will need to both backup your Aperture Library which will have the the adjustments for each image, and the volume where your referenced Masters reside.

The SD Smart Upate works in around 10 to 12 minutes, when a full copy would take 5 or more hours. The SD Smart Update will target even a USB external drive.

As an indication of the complexity of an Aperture Library, the aforementioned library has over 59,000 masters, but there are nearly 600,000 files in the library for all the info used to create Versions from Masters. This is only minimally the product of extra versions, as most of my images have only one asociated Version per Master. Thus the Aperture Library even where using Referenced Masters will have lots of support files.

I prefer to have the library be on a separate disk drive from my OS. This has long been the recommendation for such Pro apps as Final Cut, but not explicitly for Aperture.

Ernie