Couple of questions. Getting low on disc space, ran Omnidiscsweeper. My library is Masters 270GB, Previews 37.8GB and Thumbnails 37.8GB. About 10years worth of pictures. When I look at the details Masters, Previews and Thumbnails 2011 75GB, 8.9GB, 1.5GB 2012 72GB, 23GB, 4.7GB 2013 83GB, 4.4GB, 3.7GB 2014 14GB, 1.2GB, 1.2GB Something does not seem right. Are my previews for 2012 set to a different size. I would have thought I would seen data for other years, maybe it’s Omnipotent… Do I even need previews. If I share a photo outside of Aperture it’s always via Export or upload to Smugmug. Is there a program that provides details of my library Jon
You can disable automatic preview generation, and you can delete the existing previews. That will certainly save you a significant amount of space. Any time you select an image and view it in the browser in any view other than thumbnail, Aperture will generate a preview on the fly and it will store it for later. Over time you could consume more and more space from these on-the-fly previews, but you can easily delete them.
And if you changed your preview size or quality setting at some point in time, that could explain the difference in space consumed for one year versus another. I have a 750GB library and told Aperture to generate unlimited size previews for all of the images in the library. The library size swelled to 1.5TB as a result.
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Previews are required for sharing outside Aperture. So if you are in Pages for example and want to access your aperture pictures, you will need previews generated to see them. In addition if you push images to iPad/iPhone they must be previews as well.