How large should an aperture referenced library be?

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How large should an aperture referenced library be?

Hi everyone-

We run Aperture with a referenced library with all masters on an external HDD. Our aperture library has 140k files (only 1200 videos and most are fairly short) and is over 200gb. This feels really large given all masters are on an external disk. I double checked to confirm they all are referenced. The three questions I have are:

+ Is 200gb for a referenced library of 140k files about right?

+ If I decided to move some of the entire library, including referenced images, to an external HDD so no part of them are on the computer at all, what's the best way to do this?

+ Are there any good cloud options for Aperture?

Thanks!

MacBook, Mac OS X (10.6.8)

Posted on Jul 26, 2015 6:38 AM

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Answer 1

Jul 26, 2015 10:00 AM in response to brandonb2222

Data point: I have 152K referenced masters on an external disk and the associated Aperture library on the iMac's disk is 181K GB. There are no videos, just jpg photos. So this would seem to match up reasonably well with what you have.

As far as moving the library, I've done that a few times with Finder drag and drop, no real issues. It takes a while of course.

One time I tried to use Carbon Copy Cloner to select just the library to copy but could not make that work.

Cloud options for Aperture? Have not done that. My set of master images is something on the order of 800KGB and that does not translate well at all to cloud hosting, in terms of upload speed and cost.

I do keep three duplicate copies of the image files, three separate external disks (USB 3), and update all three faithfully when I add new photos.

Hope this helps

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