How to share PART of my library with my laptop.

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Level 1

9 points

How to share PART of my library with my laptop.

I have an Aperture photo library on my iMac that is too large to have on my new MacBook Air. But it would be so nice to have about a dozen of my albums along with me when I travel with this fancy new laptop. I don't need editng capabilities (though I would not mind having them). It would also be handy to have meta-data.

I have this capability (in basic form) now with my iPad and iPhone. iTunes allows me to sync just the Aperture albums that I want on to these devices and the organizational structure of the albums is preserved. It seems like there ought to be a way to do something similar with my MacBook Air, with its big screen and Aperture loaded on it.

I would prefer to avoid cloud-based solutions, especially if they require the whole library to be cloud stored.

Any suggestions on how I might be able to do this would be very much appreciated.

MacBook Air (13-inch Mid 2013), OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.4)

Posted on Aug 24, 2013 5:59 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Frank Caggiano

Level 7

25,969 points

Aug 24, 2013 7:17 AM in response to Rangeley

Aperture can do what you want. You need to setup the originals as referenced, stored on an external drive with the library on the MBA's internal drive.

When you are home and want to work on the library doing adjustments you connect the external drive and Aperture will work as normal.

When you unmount the external drive Aperture will still show you all your images, using the previews it generates. You will be able to work on metadata but you will not be able to do any adjustments or export the images in the normal manner. You could drag an image out of the library which will give you a copy of the preview.

Depending on the size of your library, the quality setting of the previews and the size of the MBA's internal drive even having just the previews could take up a lot of space. As you wrote that you re only interested in some albums you could reduce the library size even further by only generating previews for the images in those albums.

regards

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Answer 2

Aug 24, 2013 7:20 AM in response to Rangeley

Pretty easy, actually. Aperture's "Export" feature lets you export any projects, albums, or folders to a new Aperture library that can moved to your laptop and used by Aperture on that laptop.

See "Exporting Projects, Folders, and Albums" in the Aperture manual for details.

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Answer 3

Rangeley Author

Level 1

9 points

Aug 24, 2013 10:02 AM in response to phosgraphis

Thanks for the very speedy replies!

I like the idea of using the "Export to a new library" feature, but was worried about creating a permanent division in my collection. The manual and support pages leaves me uncertain on a few points:

If I export a bunch of albums to a new library, does that remove them from my old/main library?

Is it realy easy and reliable to re-integrate photos and albums previously exported to a separate library back into the main library?

Does that hold true even if I edit some of the images on the exported library before re-integrating them?

What happens if I export a project to a new library, delete some of the photos in that project on a separate computer accessing that new library, and then re-integrate the modified library back into my main library? Are the deleted photos still deleted in the re-integrated library?

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Answer 4

Aug 24, 2013 10:33 AM in response to Rangeley

If I export a bunch of albums to a new library, does that remove them from my old/main library?

No it doesn't.

Is it realy easy and reliable to re-integrate photos and albums previously exported to a separate library back into the main library?

Does that hold true even if I edit some of the images on the exported library before re-integrating them?

What happens if I export a project to a new library, delete some of the photos in that project on a separate computer accessing that new library, and then re-integrate the modified library back into my main library? Are the deleted photos still deleted in the re-integrated library?

These questions are answered if you do a search for "import library" in Aperture help. The part about merging libraries provides the info you are looking for.

I also encourage you to try it. That's the best way to get answers to questions specific to your workflow. Either make sure you have a backup or two of your library, or better yet test the process using a small test library constructed for just this purpose.

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Answer 5

Rangeley Author

Level 1

9 points

Aug 24, 2013 10:43 AM in response to phosgraphis

Thanks for the follow up. I hate to experiment with these things without some validation that I am not entering into foolhardy or dangerous territory.

I tried this out. The export as Library approach works every bit as smoothly as I had hoped. I can view or edit a partial library on the road, and then re-integrate any changes to my main photo library (external drive or otherwise) when I get home. If I delete files they stay deleted. Almost all the advantages of having the whole library with me without having to take the whole library with me!

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Answer 6

Aug 24, 2013 10:50 AM in response to Rangeley

Glad to help. Keep in mind that when you think you might be "entering into foolhardy or dangerous territory" with Aperture that you first test what you are doing with a copy.

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