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Level 1

8 points

Reduce the file size of Masters

More than 75% of my photos are not adjusted or starred. Yet I preserve them for reference. They should not take up too much space. Rather 400 kB than 4MB.

After a lot of searching on the web and much discouragement and many misleading tips I found a really good solution for this.

In Aperture:

Step 1: make a smart album which contains all your photos for which you do not need fat masters.

Step 2: select them all and do File->Relocate Masters (and select a new or empty directory to collect the masters in).

Outside Aperture:

Step 3: batch resize the relocated masters. I used ImageMagick (chances are that you have it already on your Mac) (the relevant command is mogrify). This is a command line tool. Alternatively, you could create an Automator workflow that uses built-in Preview functionality to do the resize. Important: the resized master should have the same name as the original!

Inside Aperture:

Step 4: with the photos of step 2 still selected: do File->Consolidate Masters

Finished: now you have slimmed your masters, while all your metadata (including faces and places) are stil in place. One of the misleading tips was: export and re-import your photos. This will mess up your metadata, especially the metadata that is not included in the jpg file itself.

I am aware that this procedure violates a principle: do not touch the masters. For my purposes, masters are not that important. Often I need very severe crops of my photo's (because the targets are very far away), and I am looking for ways to even crop my masters (have not yet found it).

To me it is not important to adjust and tweak the images, but to manage the metadata, because I collect bird sightings with the aim to do datamining on the collection many years later.

Aperture would become much more useful to me, if it offered more (controlled) ways to modify the masters.

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.7)

Posted on May 7, 2012 8:08 AM

17 replies

May 7, 2012 11:49 PM in response to dirkr

For me a backup should be a really straightforward, thoughtless process. So I back up a hard-drive without wanting to go into details what each of my million files represents.

I agree. The thing is we never know when even casual images may have a "hero" pic in the bunch, so image originals have value; therefore IMO should be backed up before exposing them to the vagaries of any image management application. Which turns out to be really easy, just copy originals to hard drive(s) once, first thing, then never again think about it. Maximum simplicity.

Same thing with the Aperture Library. One keeps it small by using referenced Masters, which is easy because the Masters only needed that one original backup process prior to import into Aperture. Then any backup method you choose works faster and safer because the size of the Library remains minimally sized.

Any managed-Masters Library is much larger than the same Library referenced to externals, and smaller is better.

-Allen

léonie

Level 10

194,871 points

May 8, 2012 12:03 AM in response to dirkr

Then dataloss: if you show a 8MB jpeg on a 1280 wide screen, you get the same perception if you reduce it to 400 KB. It is only rarely that I am interested in the microscopic details that warrant a high resolution.

Dirk, the original quality is not only necessary for viewing at good quality - it is important if you ever want to edit it or render it for export at a different pixel size. For most other purposes the high quality previews would suffice. If you ever plan to use your images in a book or create a movie from them you will need the masters.

Léonie

Reduce the file size of Masters