I just purchased “15 Tips…” looking for some insight on how to manage my library better and it didn't really shed light on what I was struggling with. So I've decided to plea for a tip 16 upgrade if you could point me to an article, post, book etc that covers whats wrong or right with what I'm trying to do.
Tip 0 covered my basic issue, I'm an amateur photographer with way more photos than fit on my laptop's drive. I like the simplicity of a managed library (like I suspect most amateurs do) and until I max'ed out the drive, I was using my laptop as my main library and had 2 backup vaults plus time machine.
The solution to maxing out the hard drive of course was to move the library onto an external drive, but I can't carry the drive with me all the time. I use the laptop for work and travel quite a bit, but I have intermittent time to work on the library (tagging, faces, places etc). When I don't have the drive connected I lose my ability to do anything with the library so I tried having a local library with say the last year's photos and my best-of's, and then the rest of the library is back home on the big external drive.
The pitfall is I am doing lots of merge's into the main library and it seems to me that I have to be very disciplined not to screw up any work I did on that library. I've not tested how smart the merge library is, but it doesn't seem too smart and it seems it is up to me to make sure I've worked on files in only 1 of the 2 libraries.
So in a nutshell, is this the reason reference libraries were created in the first place and should I just get over it and start down that path….
Or is there something wrong with what I'm doing library wise (master library plus local work library) and should I be re-thinking how I work?
Thanks for reading and for any advice you can point me to.
-Steve
Steve,
Thanks for purchasing the book!
Short answer is… YES. You should go Referenced. That’s precisely what it’s there for.
Longer answer… merging libraries works great, and even if you do ADJUSTMENTS on one version of the library, and METADATA changes on the other, Aperture will correctly merge the two. But it’s risky, as you guessed, because if you do make the same kind of adjustments on both versions, you’ll have choose which side wins.
Merging works great if you have a main library on one machine (say a desktop Mac) and a smaller, currently library on your laptop, that you add images to while traveling. Return home, move the small library to the big machine, and merge them. That’s what it’s designed for.
You can also export individual projects as libraries from the main machine, work on them on the go, and add them back to the big one later—but again you have to be sure you don’t make changes to both sides inadvertently.
hope that helps,
-Joseph @ApertureExpert
@PhotoJoseph
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