How to disable the Aperture library database? (Only use file references?)

Right now, for all its huge benefits of photo editing, the management part of Aperture is unwieldy and cumbersome.

Hi, managing an enormous database is what Aperture is built for - and 60 GB really is a small Aperture database! There most be something wrong with your library if you think Aperture has performance problems.

If you are running out of Disk space on your System Drive, you can turn your Aperture Library into a referenced library: Select the images you want to store outside the library and relocate them to a folder of your choice:

File -> Relocate Master

Before you do that, design a folder structure for your referenced masters and make sure you have a working backup of your Aperture library. If you relocate your master image files to an external volume, you only will be able to edit your images, if that external volume is mounted, but you still will be able to browse and to tag your images if you build previews for them.

Concerning your performance problem: If your harddrive is nearly full, your system will slow down considerably, but if that is not the case and you still have plenty of disk space (20% of the disk free), then you might consider to do some trouble shooting to your Library with the Library First Aid Tools: See

Aperture 3: Troubleshooting Basics: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3805

Regards

Léonie

Ideally, like Picasa, it could just read my folder structure from the Pictures folder into an album structure inside.

As Leonie points out, that's what a Referenced Library is for. But how much disk space do you hope save this way? All you're doing is storing the masters outside the Library package. They're still being stored...

Ideally, like Picasa, it could just read my folder structure from the Pictures folder into an album structure inside. And if I delete a file, it deletes from the underlying folder too. If I add a file to a folder, it gets added into Aperture's corresponding smart folder too. If I make adjustments to a photo and it saves a new "version", then that version gets saved into the physical folder too, with a new numbered suffix.

Is this possible?

TD, I missed that whole paragraph somehow.

@Cyberpundit, even if you use a referenced scheme in Aperture, on no account touch, delete, or modify the referenced masters - Aperture is very different from Picasa in this way. Deleting or modifying a referenced master will break the reference, and you only will see broken references in your library. Using Aperture, you have to rely on Aperture to maintain the database and must not interfere with the database.

To answer the question you ask in then title of your post, the only way to disable the Aperture library database is to not use Aperture. If you use Aperture with either managed or referenced files Aperture will be managing your images.

Ideally, like Picasa, it could just read my folder structure from the Pictures folder into an album structure inside. And if I delete a file, it deletes from the underlying folder too. If I add a file to a folder, it gets added into Aperture's corresponding smart folder too. If I make adjustments to a photo and it saves a new "version", then that version gets saved into the physical folder too, with a new numbered suffix.

Is this possible?

No. Aperture does not care about any external setup of folders on your HD. For Aperture to know about an image the image has to be imported into Aperture. Simply placing it in a folder somewhere on your HD, even if that folder contains images already in Aperture will not get it into Aperture it must be imported.

If you deleted a image file that you had imported into Aperture then that file would be missing as far as Aperture was concerned.

The questions you are asking are common with people just looking at Aperture and really unsure of what the application is about. Aperture is a DAM (Digital Asset Manager, you can look that up to see what DAM's do) and digital negative developer. These functions make it a very different program from something like Picassa.

Post back if you have anymore questions.

regards

If you have referenced images, then the originals are not inside the Aperture library package, but somewhere outside, and Aperture needs to be able to access them, if you want to edit your images or export them.

You need to copy the folder with the original images from your old machine to the Pictures folder on your new machine, if you have not already done so. I sincerely hope, you still have this folder, even if you do not have a backup.

Then open Aperture and reconnect the image versions to the originals; after moving the library to a new machine Aperture cannot know where you stored the referenced originals, since the copies on the new machines are different files.

To reconnect, launch Aperture and select all images in the Browser; then select "File > Locate referenced Files" from the main menu bar. You will now see the reconnect panel.

In the upper part you see referenced image that need reconnecting, in the lower part a file chooser. Select one image in the upper panel and in the lower panel select the original image file. Then the reconnect buttons should become active. Press "Reconnect all".

Repeat this, until all your image versions have been reconnected.

Regards

Léonie