I recently bought aperture 3 after testing it for several weeks. I followed the steps on the apple site and imported photos from my iphoto library but kept them in their same location. Since then I have done several hundred edits in aperture and I would now like to consolidate my iPhoto and aperture libraries into an aperture library, then delete my iPhoto library. When I tried this I got a message stating I don't have enough disk space. I have an external drive that I would like to store my photos on, that will also give me room to grow. I think i need to move my library to this external drive before i can consolidate the libraries can someone help me with how i can do this?
I have tried the following to no avail.
1) copy and pasted my aperture library onto my external drive: after doing this, I tried to consolidate my iPhoto Library from my internal drive with my newly moved aperture library on my external drive. I received the following message “one or more of the selected master images are unavailable. You can consolidate all available masters, or cancel, connect the required drives, and try again”
2) Exported my Aperture Project as a New Library to my external drive: after doing this I then tried to consolidate my iPhoto Library on my internal drive with the newly exported library on my external drive. I received the same message as above.
3) Exported only my edited Projects as a New Library to my external drive, then I imported my iPhoto Library into the new Aperture Library I created: this seems to have worked, however it duplicated all of the pictures that were already in my New Library, even though I requested not to import any duplicates. I then Consolidated the Masters, but this did not seem to do anything.
I am not sure if # 3 worked or not, it seems to have worked, but I am not sure if all my masters are in the new aperture library. Before I delete my iPhoto library that I imported into my Aperture library, can anyone confirm that this would be a correct way to do this?
Eric,
Sorry I didn’t get to you sooner. Holidays and all that. You’ve done well trying a few options, so let me help you understand what did and didn’t work, and why.
When you copy or move a Library to a new drive, you need to point it back to your Master files again. The relationship will break because the path from Aperture to your Master files (in your case, the iPhoto Library), has changed. It’s easy to fix, but you have to manually do it. That’s why you got the errors you did in the first attempt.
For the second attempt, I’m not quite sure what went wrong there, since the export of intact Projects from a Library to a new drive (or any drive) should have maintained the link to the referenced files.
Whatever the reason and regardless of the method (first or second attempt), the correct way to fix the broken link problem is to open the Referenced File manager. I find it’s best to go to the Photos view [screenshot] and select all the photos in the view, then select the File > Locate Referenced Files command. From there you can see which ones are offline and/or missing, and reconnect. Once all files are reconnected to your Masters, you shouldn’t have any problems Consolidating.
In attempt three, if I understand correctly you did the same thing as in attempt two, but then reimported the iPhoto Library again, which resulted in the duplicates. Aperture’s “detect duplicates” feature leaves a lot to be desired, to be honest, so I’m not hugely surprised that it didn’t work.
I think you were better off with attempts one or two; two being the best. From there, reconnecting to your masters and then consolidating the library would be the right way to go.
Let me know how you proceed. Being Christmas I may not be online a whole lot, but I’ll try not to let the question go unanswered for too long :)
Happy holidays,
-Joseph @ApertureExpert
@PhotoJoseph
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