Great site! Thanks. I'm new here, and to the digital processing side of things.
Sorry if this has been covered elswhere.
I have a an early 2011 17” MBPro 2.3GHz 750GB with Lion 10.7.5
I have played with Ap 3.2.3 a little and am getting more paid photo jobs - time to get serious and properly oganised with my library/file structure and workflow (I don't have one of those yet either!).
I shoot with a Pentax K-5 and a K-5IIs, sometimes every other day.
I envisage keeping two mirrored back-up 2TB drives at home for storing RAW and maybe completed/processed jpegs.
Am keeping a 1TB LaCie Rugged drive with the MBP for Time Machine back ups so cards can be continuously formatted and on the go when away from home. I envisage possibly keeping current projects on the MBP for processing while away/currently working on them.
To achieve this, do I/can I/should I, split libraries eg. stored stuff in one library on the 2TB drives(s) and a smaller library on the MBP? Should I have Aperture libraries or a referenced filing system?
At present I have around 150GB (around 200+ folders all named yyyymmdd + a few other names) of unprocessed Raw images in an folder in 'Pictures' on the MBP just waiting for me to get myself set-up properly!
I'm open to other/any suggestions and resouces re managed vs referenced, workflow or anything else I've mentioned as I'm new to all this. (I had a good neg filing set-up! after some good advice on getting organised at the start of my photography).
Thanks,
Dave.
I prefer using a referenced system. Primarily because I have over 12TB of images stored across 8 different drives. Plus there are times when I may want to access the images directly with other software and it is much easier to access the masters.
Secondly, if there is ever even the remote possibility that you will use another software option in the future, your images won’t have to moved outside of the Aperture library.
In the end, whatever you decide, be consistent in how, where and when you save your image files … if you use referenced, never, ever, ever move, rename (the files or the folders) or otherwise confuse the location of your images outside of Aperture and you should be fine.
With the ability for Aperture to export projects as libraries, import and merge libraries, you can have as many or as few as you would like. Some users like to keep a separate library for each calendar year, some like to use a different library for each major subject category … some users insist on having only a single library regardless of size. For myself, I use the calendar year method. Then at the end of the year, I merge that library with my master library that has ALL my images in one place.