Mr.1977
Level 1 (0 points)

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

I have an external harddrive, which has a ton of photos on it, I also have about 120 700Mb CD's waiting to be sorted. It's basically 10 years worth of highschool photos which need sorting into something like Year > Event (Football) etc.

 

Would aperture be good for this? Will it move photos on the external drive? Would someone else connecting to the drive be able to see the new organized layout? Or would they need Aperture also.

 

Or it there a better program/solution.

 

The exernal drive is a shared Drobo on the network if that makes a difference. I will be connecting via USB  or Firewire to the drive when I do the heavy organizing.

 

Thanks

Posted on May 11, 2012 12:14 PM

by William Lloyd,Solvedanswer
William Lloyd William Lloyd
Level 7 (21,183 points)
A:

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.

Posted on May 11, 2012 7:51 PM

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Mr.1977

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

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  • by William Lloyd,Solvedanswer

    William Lloyd William Lloyd May 11, 2012 7:51 PM in response to Mr.1977
    Level 7 (21,183 points)
    May 11, 2012 7:51 PM in response to Mr.1977

    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.

  • by léonie,Helpful

    léonie léonie May 11, 2012 9:22 PM in response to Mr.1977
    Level 10 (108,906 points)
    iCloud
    May 11, 2012 9:22 PM in response to Mr.1977

    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

  • by scubajwd,Helpful

    scubajwd scubajwd May 13, 2012 9:16 AM in response to Mr.1977
    Level 1 (25 points)
    May 13, 2012 9:16 AM in response to Mr.1977

    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

  • by Mr.1977,

    Mr.1977 Mr.1977 May 15, 2012 2:05 PM in response to scubajwd
    Level 1 (0 points)
    May 15, 2012 2:05 PM in response to scubajwd

    Thanks so much for all your help. Going to go with the export to web gallery option on an external drive connect via a Thunderbolt connection directly to one of the servers.