With a library this size, I was advised to move to aperture several months ago and I did. 5 months later and several nightly 8-16 hour rebuilds later, my aperture continues to perform poorly. I have since turned off Faces, Previews, Places etc - but this is taking away a lot of the power features.
I have read many posts here about 1 large library vs. many smaller libraries. I favor the 1 large library because I have all my content in one place. When looking for photos or sharing - I don't have to repeat some steps in multiple libraries.
I have chosen to go with folder-organized vs. aperture-managed , so my pictures are arranged as Date-based folder visible in the MacOS.
I have an iPhoto 'unified' library since I switched from iPhoto.
* Should I export my 550Gb library out and re-import it into a native Aperture library ?
* Is there a material difference between a native aperture library vs. a 'unified' one ?
* If I don't care for the intermediate versions of each picture - Is there a way to just retain the final version and essentially flatten out the intermediate versions ?
Let’s start with just your performance issues. What are the specs of your Mac? Model, memory size, hard disk size, etc., etc.? Performance problems can’t be addressed without this information.
How much space is left on your hard drive? Once you pass approximately 80% of available space processing slows way down. I am seeing a marked slowing as my 1T drive is filling up. I have ordered a new 3T WD Personal Cloud drive in order to get back up to speed myself.
http://speeddemon2.com
thanks for the responses
I have a 3Tb Fusion now and need to decide whether to go with a ‘Unified’ or Aperture-native library when importing my 500 Gb library
Is there an advantage to the aperture native library format ? Or is the Unified library the way to go regardless of whether I need iPhoto access or not
With the latest Aperture and iPhoto, there is only one Library format .. Unified. It doesn’t matter which application you use, the Library format is the same. Aperture offers more features, obviously, but they do use the exact same Library format.
That said, you could create a new Library and import your existing Library into it. It will leave the referenced files exactly where they are. I don’t know if this will improve your performance, but it should certainly clean up and optimize the database to some degree.
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