Best way to set up Aperture

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Aperture: Use locally mounted Mac OS X Extended volumes for your Aperture library

Then you already have read, that it is not supported to have the Aperture library on a network volume. The best way to be mobile with your library would be to have it on a small, portable disks, that can be connected to the fastest port your mac has.

There'sno way to work on the same files at home on my Macbook as in the office on my Mac desktop unless I take my entire library of 100,000 photos with me? There must be a better way!

A library on a remote volume is simply not supported by Aperture as stated in the document mentioned above. I would not risk it - my photos are too valuable for me.

What I do, when I am away from home for a longer time, is to export the project I am currently working on as a new library and copy this library to my MacBook Pro. When I return, I import that library into the main library and merge it, so that the updated versions will be kept.

So, if I'm understanding correctly, there really is no way for two computers, each using Aperture, to access and use the same Aperture Library.

The only supported way is to connect an external drive alternately to the computers.

The reasons:

• The Aperture library needs to be on a volume formatted MacOS X Extended (Journaled). Other filesystems may cause library corruption because of incompatible filenames or pathes to files. Aperture 3.5 or later is checking the filesystem compatibility and will not open a library on a drive with a different filesystem. NAS drives usually need different filesystem and will not work.
• The other problem is nerwork access. An Aperture library is not just a set of folders, but a single-user database system. And if a database has not been designed for network access, you cannot rely on database transactions being done consistently, if if there are transmission errors. Some form members have tried it with previus Aperture versions, as you can see, if you search the posts here, but frequently this has caused problems.
• You would need a very fast network, if you would want to work with a remote Aperture library. Editing and browsing needs a very fast access to the Aperture library, or the response time would be slow.

You will have more joy with Aperture, if you conect the drive with the library directly to the fasted port your Mac has to offer. I have my main Aperture library on a second internal drive, and frequently a small working library on the internal SSD system drive.