Reduce the file size of Masters

And if the original masters are RAW?

Right while what you did will work for JPG's it will not work with RAW files.

And JPG's already being compressed, by recompressing them again as you are doing here the image quality will realy be impacted. Plus I find it hard to believe your getting much of a savings in file size, going from JPG to JPG.

While doing this may be worthwhile for a situation like yours, where you're not interested in the image just the metadata, most folk asking this question are concerned about image quality.

And the majority of users asking this are starting out with RAW images.

regards

Sorry Dirk but I strongly disagree with the whole approach. It is complex, time consuming and intentionally destroys image data just to save on cheap hard drive space.

IMO we spend a lot of money (cameras, lenses, tripods, travel, etc.) to gain the capability to capture images, so we should never intentionally limit the image data unless for an unavoidable reason.

Anything after shot is not an unavoidable reason and hard drive capacity is cheap. IMO we should:

• Keep things simple to help avoid user/software/hardware error

• Capture RAW (or RAW + JPEG, my preference)

• Back up original RAW captures to multiple drives

• Store RAW files on secondary hard drives and import into Aperture by reference

My 02.

-Allen

dirkr wrote:

But it is a terrible waste to keep the masters for the 80% of the photos to which I never will devote any editing effort.

External hard drive storage costs less than $100 to store 50,000 20-MP-sized image files.

If photos might have future usage IMO they are worth storing at a cost of $0.002 each (times the number of backups). Truly zero-value photos of course just get deleted, ideally in-camera.

Suppose for instance in the future you want to evaluate and document an apparent evolving species variation. You want all the image quality you can get. Especially if you sometimes need severe crops.

However IMO the need for simplicity is even more important. It is most safe to have one routine for handling all pix, and that routine should maximize both security and image quality.

Just my 02.

-Allen

I'm with Allen on this one. Complexity is the mother of dataloss. That's one complex workflow you’ve devised and, well, it begs another question... Why are you using Aperture at all? Aperture is designed specifically for the one thing you don't want - a lossless workflow. If that's what you want to do it would be a whole lot simpler to use another app - one that doesn't force you through cumbersome hoops to throw away data.

With Allen's that makes 04c

Regards

TD

If space for something like online backup of the Aperture Library is of paramount importance another (IMO not not bad) choice might be aggressive culling during import to Aperture:

• Keep things simple to help avoid user/software/hardware error

• Capture RAW (or RAW + JPEG, my preference)

• Aggressively delete unwanted pix in-camera

• Back up original RAW captures to multiple drives

• Store RAW files on secondary hard drives and carefully review each file during import into Aperture by reference, unchecking the 80% less desirable RAW files you refer to before hitting the import button. That way all RAWs still exist because they were saved to external drives during backup and you can go look for them in the future if necessary. If you import as RAW + JPEG ("Both, RAW as Master") they would even still show in Aperture because with no RAW file imported Aperture treats a JPEG as Master even when you tell it to treat RAWs as Master.

HTH

-Allen

Dirk-

Dirk-

We cross-posted. See if my suggestion to uncheck RAWs above has any merit. Note that: (IMO not not bad) is supposed to be: (IMO not bad).

dirkr wrote:

(3) I really want to have all my images in one database, the good, the bad and the ugly.

I agree 110%. I find referencing Masters on external drives to be the solution.

-Allen

dirkr wrote:

Aperture has nice facilities for the selection process, I prefer using those above "aggressive deletion in camera".

Yes, that is a major negative of that part of my suggestion.

I prefer to keep all essential data on the hard disk in my computer, otherwise my back-up workflow becomes too complicated!

Actually it becomes less complicated:

1) "Stuff" happens (scores of threads here clearly document that). IMO backup of originals should happen before import into Aperture or any other images management app anyway.

2) Once originals are properly backed up the Aperture backup process becomes much more simple because one never again needs to back up the image files. Just use Vaults or any other backup routine on the much smaller Library that results from use of referenced Masters.

Note that in general, handling larger sized-batches is always slower and more problematic than handling smaller-sized batches.

my camera does not do RAW.

That is your choice and is fine.

Do note that JPEG files have already been lossy-compressed. Every additional size reduction further corrupts the image file in an exponentially lossy fashion. JPEG originals are all the more reason to not apply additional reduction routines.

Aperture's non-destructive workflow is ideal for you because it prevents the original JPEG Master from multiple saves that otherwise would be corrupting the image.

IMO doing further reduction on JPEG originals is a very bad idea. And JPEGs are small anyway!

-Allen

dirkr wrote:

Of course it is important to destroy image data. It is called data reduction. Our eyes and brains do it all the time.

Our eyes and brains are constrained by our unexpandable skulls. OTOH with computer-based image files and a competent database we can continually increase storage cheaply.

Of course it is important to destroy image data. ...Why should the recording of a rather dumb sensor be exempt?

Actually your camera at its best lossy-JPEG(Fine) setting already has destroyed a large amount of image data. My argument is that it is a bad idea to intentionally destroy more data during post-process storage.

Whether RAW or JPEG my opinion is that zero image data should be intentionally destroyed after the shot just for storage purposes.

I want to keep the valuable data and strip the rest.

Your camera has already done that for you using the lossy JPEG algorithm. JPEG (Fine) is actually quite a high quality way to lose lots of image size. Guessing that you are shooting with a Nikon P510 I estimate that JPEG has already scraped your pix of about 80% of their original image data.

-Allen