Is Aperture more stable w/ larger libraries (esp. Faces)?

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Level 1

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Is Aperture more stable w/ larger libraries (esp. Faces)?

I have a large library of nearly 30,000 photos that has been with me essentially since 2005. I've made several attempts at going through and tagging faces, but continue to find iPhoto slow and that it occasionally forgets faces that I've tagged. I've gone through events as many as three times only to come back in a few months to find that there are faces that I *know* I tagged showing up as untagged.

I'm wondering if Aperture's more professional nature and that it's developed on a more modern 64 bit codebase would mean that it would be more stable with Faces in larger libraries? This is my personal photo library, but I am quite familiar with Apple's more professional offerings in Final Cut Pro X, which I use nearly daily.

iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.1)

Posted on Aug 21, 2012 7:25 PM

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Answer 1

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William Lloyd

Level 7

21,311 points

Aug 21, 2012 7:55 PM in response to kepardue

My library is roughly 35,000 images, about 450 GB, and Faces works quite well (I'd actually steered away from Faces until the 3.3 update). I've had no noticeable slowdown since enabling it in 3.3.

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Answer 2

Aug 22, 2012 4:36 AM in response to kepardue

+1 to William's post. I kept Faces off until 3.1.3 (iirc). It's been stable since then. Afaict, if you don't use Faces even though it is enabled, it doesn't slow you down much (and then, only at import). On large Libraries (more than 100,000 Images) Faces runs a little bit slow. When using Faces, it is best to use it at the Project(s) level rather than the Library level. (Léonie has posted some helpful hints on the forum -- try a search.) And of course many problems and confusions can be avoided by reading the User Manual. Here is the section on Faces.

All-in-all, I find it only moderately more useful than simply keywording Images with the names of people in them.

IME, it has been completely reliable since I turned it on (no lost or misplaced data). I suggest running "Repair" and perhaps even "Rebuild" on your Library before turning Faces on. Back-up first (always, but just a precaution; I have yet to hear of a single case of Libraries being vitiated by either action.)

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