Syncing Aperture between Macs

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Level 1

11 points

Syncing Aperture between Macs

I recently started dividing my Aperture work between my home iMac, and my MacBook Pro. The problem here is that, whenever I want to do a makeshift sync, I export the edited photos from one Mac as an Aperture library (to keep all adjustments, as well as the original image format), and then import the library into the second computer. This is slow, inefficient, and needlessly cumbersome.

I considered using Photo Stream, but the 25 GB I have on my iCloud (which will shrink to 5 a year from now) is nowhere near enough to house my colossal Aperture library, which should break the 100 GB milestone in a month or two; not to mention, using Photo Stream uses up Internet bandwidth, and flattens the images (merges the adjustments, instead of preserving them as editable ones).

Has anyone else had this kind of problem? Can anyone think of a solution?

Aperture 3

Posted on Nov 15, 2012 12:32 PM

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Answer 1

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léonie

Level 10

194,761 points

Nov 15, 2012 12:39 PM in response to julesmazur

, I export the edited photos from one Mac as an Aperture library (to keep all adjustments, as well as the original image format), and then import the library into the second computer. This is slow, inefficient, and needlessly cumbersome.

But that is exactly how it is done. There is no safe way to sync two Aperture libraries right now.

The only other option would be to share the Aperture library between the two macs by putting it onto an external disk and to connect this disk to the mac you are currently using, but that defeats the purpose of a laptop computer.

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Answer 2

Nov 15, 2012 8:49 PM in response to julesmazur

You could also use a backup software such as Superduper. It usually makes a backup of a complete drive, so to avoid changing the whole drive on the second computer, I would create an extra partition on each computer put the aperture library and photos on it and use the smart update feature of Super duper to back it up. Now that should work if you are the only person editing the files, and provided that you do not make edits on both systems at once that you would need to merge.

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