Hi,
In the last few months having discovered Aperture I've been importing in a mad scramble every picture I've collected over the years into an Aperture library, from diverse iPhoto libraries, backups of iPhoto libraries, CF and SD cards, etc.
Needless to say this has resulted in an awful mess with dozens of folders, projects and albums (smart or otherwise) with thousands of duplicates, as these were blissfully imported from backup libraries.
Now my problems are twofold. The first is that along the road something went wrong resulting in frequent Aperture crashes, for example when creating a new smart album - boom. My symptoms match those described in
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4183094?start=0&tstart=0
but the solution described in that thread doesn't work for me. I've tried to repair permissions, repair the library, rebuild the library, nothing helps. The second problem is the aforementioned structural mess.
So I think the best course of action would be to start over again and hopefully swat two mosquitos at once. So far I've run Duplicate Annihilator for Aperture (which incidentally worked really well) and tagged all the duplicates with a keyword, exported those to a separate library just to be sure and then deleted them. Then I exported all originals to a folder on desktop with a year/month/day subfolder structure.
I would like to import everything back into a new library and start organising. To avoid having to go through this process a second time I'd really like to get it right this time.
I'd like to maintain them by year have projects labeled as “Date - Subject”, like “2012-01-31 another day in the twilight zone”. In order to do it right, should I import them subfolder by subfolder into separate projects. or should I have Aperture import everything in bulk (but then I'm doubting as to which options to select).
I'm tempted to give into temptation and press that Import Checked button as is warned against in the Getting Started ebook, because I'm keen to move on. But that's what's got me into this mess in the first place so…
Sorry for the wall of text - any advice is appreciated!
I sort of understand what you mean, and find myself in a similar situation.
I’m migrating my main library to a new larger drive as I type. What I really should have done is to migrate projects independently of the main library. That way I could keep the ones that are actively worked on, but leave the main master library with them all in as a kind of static backup with all the other projects intact.
To sort of answer your question, Maarten, I think you’d be correct to import each subfolder one by one. Create a project with the “year/month/day/subject” format you want to use, and then import the images from each relevant folder.
Meanwhile, it looks like the 310GB library folder I have will take about 2 days to copy to a new drive. Where’s Thunderbolt when you need it?
As an update to my last post, I let the Finder copy finish (took several hours over FireWire 400!). I then deleted the copy and set about exporting various projects as new libraries to the disk from my old “main” library. That also took several hours, but now I have much smaller, faster, neater libraries.
It was worth the time, I think.
Heather Maarten, I mean…
I’m playing catch-up and this is a really long post — please let me know if it still needs attention, thanks.
@PhotoJoseph
— Have you signed up for the mailing list?