Finally, I am ready to update my computer to Leopard and Aperture 2. What makes me ready now, is that I have settled on a library structure that ensures that I know where all the images I want to access are, and that they are backed up in at least two separate drives.
Before Aperture, our family had an iMac with iPhoto and a few thousand photos from the past several years. We got our daughter a Macbook for graduation that her photos went on. I purchased a Macbook Pro and Aperture last June and began importing new photos into Aperture. Due to a lot of travel, I didn’t get to spend as much time seeing how I wanted to organize my images, until recently. As a result, some images were scattered over several computers and hard drives and it was nearly impossible to tell what had been backed up and what hadn’t until I finally got them organized into one library.
I originally thought I would create separate libraries for my husband, our daughter and me. The problem with that came about when I wanted to see all of our images from a certain trip to choose the ones to print.
The second idea was to have one primary library residing on my Macbook Pro and keep all the images as referenced images with the masters stored on an external hard drive in folders. This would allow me to see all of the images wherever I took my computer and would allow rating and metadata changes to happen, but not editing without reconnecting to the external hard drive. That idea did not allow for the masters to be backed up by the Aperture vault system.
I recently settled on making a Master Aperture Library that resides on an external hard drive and that consists of all of our photos. A Working Aperture Library sits on my Macbook Pro. When we return from a trip, I import the images into the Working Aperture Library and add keywords, ratings, and other metadata as needed. The new trip project is then imported into the Master Aperture Library where anyone in our family can go to access their images.
The third Aperture library that I have consists of the images I pulled out of my parents’ iPhoto library. Like many people I know, they’ve gotten a computer and a digital camera, but no plan for backing up their computer. I took an external hard drive to their house, copied their iPhoto library on it and imported it into an Aperture library. Not only am I able to ensure that their images are safe, I can now surprise them with a custom book of their recent trips.
My Master Aperture Library is approximately 60 GB in size. It has functioned well so far due to breaking the library into folders with smaller projects underneath them. With Quick Preview in Aperture 2, it should be very fast to work in the Master Library.
1 Comment
February 26, 2008 at 3:12 pm
That sounds like a good idea! =) I like your Master Library.