First of all - love your site! It's great and I am so grateful for all of the tips. I've also purchased your e-book, which I devoured in one sitting and it is SUPER helpful. I have two questions for you, though, as I'm having a very hard time cleaning up my Aperture library, which was in existence before I read your helpful tips.
My problem is that I already had an Aperture library that is referenced up and running and the folder structure set up on an external hard drive, to save space, since I'm working on a MacBook Air. So, my first question is how should I switch to the folder structure by date that you recommend, which looks like a great way to organize. I have organized all of my projects within Aperture, but if I export them as Master Files and then reimport those into a new library, I'm afraid it's going to be a mess, because not all of them are quite as neat as your “by date” idea in the book. I have several projects of “Misc” pictures (like generic ones of my child, for example) going back 7 years or so, and am not sure how to do that neatly by date. I had kind of wanted to export it all and import as a new, clean Aperture library, still with referenced files, to be sure that it was all organized and efficient and to provide consistency in the folder structure. Also, because of my second problem…
Even though my library is referenced (and I checked to make sure there aren't a bunch of managed files out there that I didn't know about, per your advice on your site), the folder holding all of the Master Files on the external drive is only 136GB, my Aperture Library on my laptop is 91GB. How is it possible that it's almost the same size? I've gone through your 10 steps of cleaning up - removing duplicates, finding files, emptying trash, etc. and still it is this crazy ratio and it never moves I did “Get Info” before and after each of the clean up steps and didn't notice any difference, which might be because I didn't have that many of the potential problems listed, but then I can't figure out what's making the library 85% of the size of the referenced files. Have you ever heard of a problem like that and/or do you know what I could do about it?
Thank you so much for any help you can give me. I really love your e-book and want to put those steps into practice, but I am just STUCK right now because I can't figure out how to get a good, clean start, I'm down to almost no room on my laptop and I can't import the photos I'm taking, etc. until I get the new system up and running and can do it properly without making a bigger mess!
I suspect your previews are set at “Don’t Limit” which is original size. Go to preferences and check that. Put it a much small size and Update Previews…or delete them altogether.
As far as getting your library reorganized, I would recommend starting a new library and set it up the way you want going forward. (http://www.apertureexpert.com/user-tips/2010/8/20/generating-previews-on…)
In my opinion, you would be doing a lot of unnecessary work to fix the structure because you may not ever need to look at most of those older photos anyway. Only do the work you need to do now.
Or, you can take that full four years of projects and put them in one folder named 2008-2012. Then proceed with your new naming convention from that day forward.
Thanks for replying, Thomas. That’s a great idea about putting them in a folder that contains all those years and then not worrying about it except for going forward. I figured a new library was probably the best way to go. So, do I just export these photos to a master folder like you suggested, but with the event and date naming convention for each Master File suggested in the e-book and then when I reimport them to the new library, will I have to reorganize all of them into projects that make sense again? I think that’s where I’m getting confused. On exactly what steps to take to export them with the proper new naming convention and then the exact steps to reimport them to get them into the desired projects with the least amount of work required!
As for the previews, I should have listed that in my original post, I apologize. I currently have that set to fit within 1920x1920, which says it is an 8 (medium) preview quality. Is that still too high? Since I store all of the photos on an external drive, I’d like to maintain previews of most of them, but maybe I’m asking for too much. I did update to this preview quality after reading on this site (can’t remember where it was set before.) Is the change then applied to all of my existing previews or is that why you’re suggesting making an entirely new library - because it isn’t and would be more work to go do that?
Thanks again - sorry to be dense!
I don’t think you should export the images. Just leave them as they are. I mean just make a blue folder in your Aperture Library, name it, and drag everything into it. Then start a new blue folder and start every new project going forward with the new naming convention.
This way, you don’t have to do any work, but your stuff stays the same. I just don’t think it’s worth putting in all that time and frustration to fix the past unless you have a important reason to do so. And, in my mind, the only valid reason to spend time organizing something like that is if you know it will save you more time later.
Everyone works differently, but if you are like me, I’m spending most of my post-production time on current projects. Once I’m done, I rarely go back and have to do anything. The exception is contest time at the end of the year or the occasional request for an image that ran prior. Those instances are so rare for me that I wouldn’t want to spend any significant time organizing old stuff just for that situation.
If you want to start a new library, keep the one you have the way it is and just start new library with only new images.
The size of your library and images is actually very small… under 400 GB. In the big scheme of things, that’s not much to worry about. Since you shoot so little volume, I’d just keep one Aperture library with all your images in it. (To give a a point of reference, this year I’ve filled up 1.06 of a 2 TB hard drive and the year isn’t even half over and that’s only the images. My 2012 library is 61 GB on a separate drive.
Thanks for the thoughts on not exporting. While I understand that my library isn’t huge relative to yours, it is huge relative to the size of my MacBook Air’s hard drive. It’s nearly 50% of the laptop’s HD space and I can’t really function that way, since I need space for other files, applications, etc. I’m constantly getting messages that my hard drive is too full (under 1GB left) so I need to figure out a way to make the Aperture library (not the referenced master file library, which is on a 1TB external hard drive) smaller. What I cannot understand is why that relative size is so out of whack (91GB vs. 136 GB)
Any thoughts on fixing that, which is the much larger problem for me, would be appreciated. Thanks!
Andrea,
Remember that the library size isn’t just about images or previews, it’s also about metadata and thumbnails, both of which take up space.
If you’re that restricted on space, consider manually managing your previews. If you’re on an SSD I think that’s your only option. I think this post will answer and and all questions you might have on how that works: A Comprehensive Look at Thumbnails, Previews, and More in Aperture 3.
I use the keyboard shortcut shift-return to generate previews on demand, and regularly delete ALL previews in my Library just to keep it lean.
@PhotoJoseph
— Have you signed up for the mailing list?
I don’t know if this is relevant to Andrea’s huge image library problem, but I recently exported some projects from a 13.6GB library and each export was 13.6GB until I did ‘repair database’. I wonder if that would reduce the size of the database… Probably worth waiting to se what Joseph has to day about that!
David
d.