>100k photo limit?

Where did you read of an arbitrary limit on projects sizes?

I've never seen one. A lot of poster here will recommend, for different reasons, keeping the size of projects below some threshold but I'm not aware of any actual program limit.

Hamper wrote:

I just seem to remember it as a feature in Aperture three (I upgraded from AP2), that Projects could now hold more than 10k or something?

So there is no limit?

Not that I ever heard. (10,000 or 100,000 -- either -- but which do you mean?)

At some point (around 3.2 iirc) I did read an Apple release that said that Aperture could handle more than 1,000,000 Images. (I have since searched for this statement, and did not find it.) Before setting up a large database, I set up a test Library of 15,000 Projects containing 400,000 Images. This ran OK on a machine w. 4 GB of RAM. Occasionally I reload this Library for testing -- I have never had any problems with it.

But that tests number of Projects per Library, and number of Images per Library. I have never tested number of Images per Project. I am one of the ones who recommend that all users stick to "One Project = one 'out-in-the-world' shoot", and thus limit Projects to less than 500 Images. This recommendation arose during the early weeks of Aperture 3, when there were still many buglets in the code. Limiting Projects helped avoid problems.

Those problems have, afaict, been taken care of. Nevertheless, I still recommend keeping Projects relatively small because that is how they were originally planned to be. There are many, many ways to group Images in Aperture. I'm sure there are other equally-good ways to create your groups of >100,000 Images.

Well I've been using Aperture since 3 and I don;t recall ever seeing anything officially putting a limit on project size.

Now while I'm not as fanatical as some posters here who try to limit projects to 200 or 500 images or whatever, I'd be leery of putting that many images into one project.

I realize you say it works for you and you realize that you are using Aperture in a non-standard way but I have to ask why do you do this? I can see no advantage of placing so many images in one project that using projects, folders and albums wouldn't also address.

regards

Now while I'm not as fanatical as some posters here who try to limit projects to 200 or 500 images or whatever, I'd be leery of putting that many images into one project.

I like to keep the projects small to reduce computational complexity, not because of a possible library corruption. Smaller projects limit the scope of searches and smart albums relative to the projects, so the responses are quicker; also smaller projects seem to load faster, when browsing the project; and for me it is much easier to browse the projects and find certain images within, if the size is small, and the project does not contain more than the images of a certain event. This may be different, if you are working at a large screen, but with my tiny 17" MBP display it is no fun to scroll thru 10000 pictures.

To group all images of a year, or a vacation, of a decade, I use folders. Folders can easily be collapsed and hide all library inside and get large parts of the library out of the way.

The only size restriction I still notice noticed in Aperture is the file size of the images itself. Aperture still crashes, when I try to open a 2GB tiff. 😢

Hamper wrote:

I just keep everything in one place and have lots of smart albums come off of one project, it works well. I do a lot of interchanging, I need everything in one place, I don't much like "Projects".

For "one place" use the container "Photos" at the top of the Library tab of the Inspector.

Stick all you Projects in a Folder and use the disclosure Triangle to collapse the Folder.

Smart Albums can all have their source set to "Library":

(Screenshot)

There was a limit in AP 1.5, which was changed in AP2.

Reference post with info listed from Joe Schorr. See 5th bullet point. 😉

http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/content_page.asp?cid=7-9258-9278

I haven't heard of any concrete numbers for projects.

I have seen quite a few posts on various sites and blogs where pro photogs have libraries above 500,000 images. The linked post in my first comment indicates that Bill Frakes library contained 700,000 images in AP 2.

I suspect the database would support a much larger number than 100,000 in a project, but I also suspect that you might hit some type of performance wall with the thumbnails for a project containing lot more than that 100,000 number (depending on memory and thumbnail size). At the default thumbnail size, I would suspect you could push it pretty far beyond (as I suspect the numbers used in that post are probably based on defaults).

As long as you have good working backups, you can test the limit yourself. 😉

Sorry I don't have more concrete info on that question.

Still, I can't see why you would have 100K images in a single _project_. Really, Aperture is flexible and there are way better ways to organize your photos than having all 100K in the same project.

100K in a library is a cinch. 500k in a library is a cinch. But why anyone would have more than say 5000 images in a single project baffles me. If I'm on a 10 day shoot, I create a folder and put a project-per-day inside the folder.

Make Aperture work for you.

Great. And if you were driving a manual transmission car and complaining that it was really noisy at 40 mph in first gear I'd suggest you shift.