Need help in moving my aperture to an external hard drive as to free up space on mini-mac internal 500mg drive. Also, confused as to what is actually moved: image masters and versions, or the whole program. I will be using the external drive with the mini-mac.
Aperture 3, Mac OS X (10.6.8), Need to free up space on computer
Aperture is a program. Leave it in your Applications folder.
The Aperture program is used to open and change data files. Aperture's data files are called Libraries. They have the file name extension ".aplibrary".
You can put your Library on any directly-mounted storage drive. To move it to an external drive, use Finder and move the file, then double-click it to open it.
Please read through this concise guide to the parts of Aperture for a description of Masters (now called Originals), Versions, and Images.
This section in the User Manual is also apropos.
You can put your Library on any directly-mounted storage drive. To move it to an external drive, use Finder and move the file, then double-click it to open it.
As Kirby said.
Only make sure, the drive is formatted for mac - it needs to be formatted MacOS X Extended (Journaled). Aperture will not open a library, if it is on a drive with a different format. (see: Use locally mounted Mac OS X Extended volumes for your Aperture library). You can reformat the drive with Disk Utility, if it should be formatted differently. Reformatting will erase the contents, so you need to backup any previous content.
I'd recommend to repair the library using the Aperture library First Aid Tools, before moving the Aperture Library (see: Aperture 3 User Manual: Repairing and Rebuilding Your Aperture Library). If the library should have broken links, they are easier repaired on the original volume.
And don't forget tu update your backup, before relocating your Aperture library.
Is your library referenced or managed? Moving a referenced library would require an addiional step to move the originals as well.
-- Léonie
How do I move aperture to external drive
