I have the bulk of my photos in a managed Aperture library, stored on an external 1TB drive hooked up to my iMac at home. I also have a MacBook Pro, and I often download and process photos on the go into a much smaller library there (also managed).
What’s the best way to go about merging or syncing my portable library with the master library? I tried importing the portable library into the main library - that went fine, until I attempted to update images I had edited on the laptop, and instead ended up with a dupe of all the portable images in the master library.
Is there a better way? Or should I abandon the idea of a portable library, and instead just export projects from the laptop and import them to the master library and not try to maintain them in two places?
Simon,
Big question, and worth of a Tip entry. I’ll get to that soon. But the short answer is that managing duplicate libraries long term is a Bad Idea™. Moving a library from laptop to desktop is great and works perfectly. Exporting a project form the desktop to do some work on the road, then bringing it back in; also great. Even allowing changes to both libraries can work when you merge them later, but you do have to be careful. If for example you did adjustments to the same image on both machines, you’d have to pick which one wins on the merge, and this is why I say it’s a bad idea to manage this long-term. How would you possibly know which library should win? Fine for a short-term project, i.e. your assistant does metadata on one Mac and you do image adjustments on another, but I’d keep it simple like that.
If you have specific issues that you think I should address in the post, please let me know here. I’ll probably get to that next week.
@PhotoJoseph
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Hi Joseph - thanks for the response. That makes complete sense. I guess there’s no real reason to maintain images that I’ve theoretically already done some work on on the portable library. Now that I think about it, I see how that’s just asking for trouble.
Thanks again,
Simon