In Aperture 3, how can I easily move entire projects out of my main Ap Library into other libraries? My Ap library is running super slow because it's overloaded l so I have created two new libraries, but can't seem to move the projects into them

Hello Annabel,

To move entire projects export them as Aperture Libraries, and then import those Libraries into the other Aperture Library:

• Select the Project in the Inspector, then
  File -> Export -> Project as Library
• In the other Library do:
  File -> Import -> Library/ Project

But I am not quite convinced, that the size of your current Aperture Library is responsible for the slowness of Aperture - Aperture is designed to cope with huge libraries.

You may want to post your hardware setup and details of your library, and some of the hardware experts here may help you to find the reason for the slowness.

A huge library should only be a problem, if the projects are too big, and if you have many, many smart albums at the root level of your library.

So keep the projects small, and try to move some of your smart albums to lower levels in your folder structure (then Aperture does not need to scan all of your images to build the smart album).

Other reasons for Aperture's slowness may be, e.g.

• An overfull system drive and/or external drive (keep at least 20% of your drives empty)
• lack of RAM
• a corrupted Aperture Library, that needs repairing

Have you checked those options, before you split your library? It would be a pity to split it, for you would loose the ability to browse all parts at the same time, to use all your images in the Media Browser, etc.

Regards

Léonie

With only 6 GB free on your system drive, it is amazing that you get any work done on your mac at all.

What really would help in your current situation is to get yourself a very fast external drive and relocate a huge part of your master image files to that external drive. This way your Aperture library will be reduced to a managable size, without splitting the library.

Good candidates for relocating are projects you have finished to edit - but keep the projects you are currently working with as managed projects on your main drive. For the relocated projects create high quality previews, about the size of your screen, this way you can use the images in Media Browser and rate and tag the images, even if the external drive should not be connected, see the section on working with referenced images in the Aperture User Manual.

Regards

Léonie