One of the things I like to do on this blog is to discuss features in Aperture that I’ve recently discovered or perhaps just started using. And with the hundreds or thousands of features in this program it looks like I’ll have plenty to write about for a long time.
Normally when I’m on the road I take my MacbookPro and an external 500GB firewire hard drive (I recently outgrew and replaced my 250GB USB drive). I have a copy of my main Aperture library on the firewire drive for two reasons; 1. It’s a backup copy that goes with me wherever I go, just in case my home burns to the ground or a satellite drops out of the sky and crushes it. 2. I have my entire library with me in case I need an image for any reason.
One of the problems with running Aperture on my MacBookPro and the external firewire drive is that it does not run at the speed I’m used to at home on my MacPro (and that’s to be expected) due to the slower processor, less RAM, and firewire vs SATA3.0 drives. Also syncing up the two libraries presents it’s own challenges.
So this week I thought I’d try another “on the road” workflow. I created a new (empty) Aperture library on my laptop’s internal hard drive and used that library to import my photos from the week. First I created a Project called “MacWorld 2007″, then under that I created Albums called “Roadtrip to MacWorld”, “At The Show” and “San Francisco Area”. I proceeded then to import my day’s shots into the appropriate albums and began key-wording, deleting crummy shots, rating, cropping and other basic editing. This gave a huge headstart on processing my images and it sure beat watching hotel television (can you believe they don’t have 50″ plasma’s in Sheratons yet!!!).
Upon returning home all I had to do was export the project that I created on my laptop using the “Export Project” command by Control-Clicking or Right-Clicking on the project and select Export > Export Project… (Or type Shift-Command-E) and then selecting a destination for the exported project. After a few minutes a file named MacWorld2007.approject was on my desktop. I simply copied that file over to my MacPro desktop machine, launched Aperture, clicked on my main library and went to the File menu and selected Import > Projects…
A few minutes later all my photos from my trip were in my Aperture library and all albums, ratings, edits, keywords, etc were just as they were on my laptop.
I think I’ve finally settled on my preferred “On The Road” workflow … this works for my, give it a try, it might work well for you too.
Until next time,
Keep shooting.
Allen Rockwell
Allen Rockwell Photography
Allen, many thanks for your tips SPECIALLY keeping MBP Aperture Library sync'd to Mac Pro with ChronoSync. Just tried it and looks great! Have you encountered any problems? Anything we should not do? Thanks
When you export en project e.g. from Macbook Pro. Will it be possible to import the project on my main machine (Mac pro) as referenc files to my main hardrive (my main photofolders)?
Or do I have to import the files and then move the files to this hardrive with Aperture?
Allen, thanks for the tip. This is how our studio has worked since we switched to Aperture and it works great. We take our MacBook Pro on the road and dump into it and then export the project to our MacPro once we get back to the studio. It allows some rough editing by the shooter before it gets into our system.
Allen - off topic, but just wanted to say thanks for these posts. I use iViewMediaPro and Capture NX, now own Aperture for my MacBook Pro and want to make it my number one application, but trying to figure workflow before I dive in. I know I'll still want to use Capture NX for some specific Nikon options, seems I'll have to export the pic to do that though. OK, apologies for going off topic, but thanks again for all this info.
Allen, thanks for the correction. :) I have no clue what I was thinking since my own lib has over 65K
Ian,
Yep, just copy the Aperture Library.aplibrary file to any drive you want. Check out my article on keeping the library sync'd with ChronoSync at http://www.oreillynet.com/digitalmedia/blog/2006/11/syncing_aperture_libraries_on.html
was there any other problems with a copy of your main library on a HD? Did you just drag and drop copy it from your machine to the HD?
Daniel:
Actually the 10,000 image limit refers to Projects, not the library. My aperture library has 49,338 images in it, but no project has over 10,000 images.
Cheers:
I disagree. Aperture runs just fine on a MBP, it just runs better on a MP. The reason is higher end graphics cards, more RAM and 4 processors (rather than 2) on the MacPro. The MacPro is a workstation class machine, if it did not run Aperture (or any app) noticelbly faster than a laptop I would be seriously disapointed.
To Allan:
Notice that the import brings in a new project and not a new library. You still have the 10,000 images limitation for your library. A nice thing you can do with this feature is to export a project of images from years past so you can keep adding to your current library or just make a new library for OLD images and add those projects there.
I think it would be nice to write about this option, but I am not sure that anyone can write for Inside Aperture... probably just the select few ;)
To Steve P.
The SATA drives through the expresscard are faster. The only bad thing is that you also need to carry the extra card and the SATA drives need their own power supply. Some FW drives (small factor) do not need extra power and that makes it more portable.
I think it is a sad statement on the speed of aperture that you actually notice the difference between a MBP and MP.
Good grief - I'd never even notice the "Import Project" function. I was wondering how I was going to merge several libraries.
Regarding SATA: FW800 is nice, SATA is definitely better. It would be most worthwhile with a striped multi-disk RAID; I don't think it would be much advantage connecting to a single drive.
Paul,
Of course the MacPro is much faster than a MacBookPro, especially if you go with one of the higher-end graphics cards (remember Aperture uses the GPU more than most apps).
Regarding price, I paid about the same for my MacBookPro as I did for the MacPro (without monitor) ... I think the real issue is how much you need a portable Aperture solution. If portability is not a huge issue I would go with the MacPro and invest in a big monitor and fast graphics card.
BTW, I run Vista with Parallels and it runs very fast, as does XP.
Get the MacPro ... you won't be sorry.
Thanks for the article Allen - this is really informative, and touches on an issue I'm having to deal with right now.
I'm a Windows guy, and I still want Vista on at least one machine. I currently have a Macbook, and I can't decide whether to pay the extra $$$ for a Mac Pro and dual boot w/ Vista, or to get a Dell for Vista and upgrade to a MacBook Pro. Mac Pros are just so darned expensive.
Is the perf between a MBP and a Mac Pro really that significant? I want to be able to use Aperture, Photoshop and someday soon start dabbling with video, all of which are better on the Mac.
Is it really worth the extra $$$ for the Mac Pro versus a Dell/MBP combo?
Did you consider using a SATA2 Express card with a SATA drive for your external to increase performance, or is a Firewire/Firewire 800 drive "sufficient"? I've always wondered about using Firewire 800 or the newly released SATA2 Express cards, but I haven't heard from anybody who's used the SATA solution (yet)...
TIA, Steve