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? about exporting a smart album as a new Library #1
Debbie's picture
by Debbie
June 11, 2011 - 2:17pm

Hi again… I just exported to an EHD a smart album full of videos that had imported to my main Aperture library along with my photos. The library the videos were in is a managed library on my hd, but I chose to export this smart album to an EHD as a new library. I see that it exported as an Aperture Library package. Does this mean the library is managed? I just want to clear this up in my mind. I'm assuming yes since I wasn't given a choice to make it either managed or referenced. I think I understand why, but still need to read some more and watch the videos again… and again. ;)

Also, I was given three choices before exporting and one was to consolidate Masters on export. I did check that box. Was I supposed to? I wasn't sure what it meant but it sounded good. I didn't check the box to make previews b/c I wasn't sure I needed them for videos that I wasn't going to do anything with for awhile. Then there was a third box I checked but forget what it was now. Anyway, hope I did this right. These videos were taking up 45 GB of space, so I'm happy to have them moved off to an EHD, yet am glad they're still in an Aperture library that I can go open anytime when I decide I want to do something with them.

One more question about videos… not all of my videos are showing as supported by Aperture, so I have to right click on them to play them with QT. I'm wondering if they can be converted so that they do play in Aperture, or are they a lost cause? They're from an older Canon P&S. My new Canon S95 is supported.

TIA!

PS… I'm learning so much from the videos and am watching them more than once hoping it'll all sink in, so I'm sorry if I've become a pest. Not trying to be one, just trying to understand what I'm doing so I don't make BIG mistakes, like forgetting to rename all of my files on import which I just realized I did. Ugh. Oh well… moving forward. :)

~Debbie

PhotoJoseph's picture
by PhotoJoseph
June 12, 2011 - 1:51am

Debbie,

Exporting an album, smart album, or anything else from Aperture does NOT remove it from the current library. So if you’re looking to offload things from your main library, you’ll have to first export it, then delete from the primary.

The three options you have are Consolidate masters into exported library, Include Previews in exported library, and finally Show alert when finished [screenshot].

Consolidate means that the master files will be copied into the exported library as managed. If you’re moving files to a different system, or plan to delete from the current Library, then you definitely need to do this, otherwise you won’t have access to the master files themselves.

Include Previews is just a timesaver, as you can generate previews again in the new Library, assuming that it has access to the Masters (i.e. you checked the first box). However if you were, let’s say, planning on temporarily moving a project from your desktop to your laptop, so you could work on adding metadata and ratings to the photos while on the road, such that you didn’t need the Master files but you did want to be abel to see the photos quite clearly, then you would choose to NOT include masters but DO include previews. This all assumes that you will eventually be merging that exported library back into the current one. Make sense?

The last option is pretty self-explanatory ;-)

As far as the QT movies, you can always open Quicktime Player and Save As to a more generic format that Aperture will read. Try it out but compare file size before doing too many of them.

-Joseph @ApertureExpert

@PhotoJoseph
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Debbie's picture
by Debbie
June 12, 2011 - 3:54am

I completely understand now! Yay! This is what I wanted to do so it worked out perfectly. I did delete the videos from the library afterwards by creating a new project from the smart album, then deleting the project. Saved me 45 gigs on my main hd.

I love how easy it is to switch libraries! It was a pain in iPhoto. Oh, and I thought that third choice was something insignificant. I just couldn’t remember what it was. ;)

About Previews, the biggest disadvantage I’ve found so far with the ones I have deleted in my main library is I can no longer sync those photos to my iPad or iPhone in iTunes. Duh! That never occurred to me. I guess Previews are definitely necessary for an iFan like myself. Now I just need to figure out what a reasonable size is? My iMac has the asterisk next to the biggest size, and I have quality set at 9. I may have to go smaller though on both to save space. I won’t be making slideshows anytime soon so I think I can get away with smaller.

The posts you linked me to were very helpful. I’m currently going through Derrick’s Aperture course at lynda.com, so I’m very familiar with him.

As far as the videos are concerned, the unsupported ones appear to be from an older Sony P&S, not my older Canon. Thanks for the tip. I’ll try that when I’m ready to convert some of them.

Thanks so much!

~Debbie

Debbie's picture
by Debbie
June 14, 2011 - 6:03am

Strangely enough, I found out a lot of videos didn’t aggregate in the Smart Album I created to find them. I used the criteria “File type is Video” and then thinking I had collected all of the videos I moved them to a new library. After deleting them from my main library I discovered almost 500 more that didn’t aggregate into the smart album. Weird! They’re the unsupported ones which I think are .mpg or .mov? But, some of those were in the first batch so that doesn’t explain it. I had to do a manual search to find them all which was a pita, but it’s done and they’ve been moved too. I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t have been recognized as a video file type?

Anyway, just thought I’d mention it here.

~Debbie

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