Is aperture any good for organizing massive libraries on an external drive?

Well.....

Honestly, 700 CDs isn't all that many photos. It's maybe 350 GB, which is a fair bit smaller than my Aperture library. It wouldn't be hard to buy a mirrored 2 TB drive enclosure (FW800 or faster) and just put an Aperture library there and import them all. That's what I'd do personally.

Note that a Drobo is slow. And Drobo over a network is VERY slow. If you used referended masters with Aperture it would almost be tolerable with Aperture, but that's the limit of it. I'd actually avoid a Drobo totally for use with Aperture as it's a snail. A FW800 attache drive is roughly 5x faster than a Drobo, and probably 25x faster than a networked Drobo. Drobos are cool, but too slow to be practical for anything but archival IMO.

Hi,

In addition to William Lloyd's answer concerning the speed of a Drobo, please remember that the Aperture Library needs to be on a local MacOS X extended formatted volume. A Drobo would be neither - see this support article:

Aperture: Use locally mounted Mac OS X Extended volumes for your Aperture library:

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3252

So What exactly do you want to put onto the Drobo?

1. The Aperture Library?
2. Referenced masters?
3. Images exported by Aperture?

The first option is not supported by Aperture, the second may work, but only very slow (see William Lloyd's answer), and others have reported problems with this approach too. This leaves the third option: export your images to a set of folders on your Drobo for the students to access from the Finder.

Personally I would create web-galleries from the images for the students to access and download, if I want remote access for the students (File -> New -> Smart Web Page), or put copies of the images onto an ftp-server. I would not give access to my working copy of the Aperture database to the students.

Regards

Léonie

Hi Mr 1977...I echo the other comments here as I've tried going the NAS

route for referenced masters and it is too slow for "large" libraries..my

library goes back to the 1920's with some images actually shot in the late

1800's..I use Firewire drives ganged together off of my THunderbolt

display and my performance is "decent"..my main reason for posting

is this: I use Adobe LR4 for processing my images..IMHO it is tops..

HOWEVER, that said, Aperture is hands-down (again my humble opinion) the

best product going for image library organization, meta -data indexing and search..

this is from a life long user of MS Windows products..I moved all my

video and image work to MAC in July 2011 but still run Photoshop and LR4 on

the MAC as well

Just my $.02