Tranferring Apple Aperture library from computer to another

[joosttx]

I cannot figure out how to do it easily. Can someone help me out. First issue is I cannot find the library

[sbornia]

Houston, if you look in Finder > Pictures you should see "Aperture Library" and a size of several hundred gigs (I'm guessing given how many pix you take).

I haven't tried to move my library from one computer to another, but imagine that one way is to copy it to an external drive and then move it from there to the new machine. That's got to be faster via FW800, USB3 or Thunderbolt than going over wifi??

[robin3mj]

Houston, if you look in Finder > Pictures you should see "Aperture Library" and a size of several hundred gigs (I'm guessing given how many pix you take).

I haven't tried to move my library from one computer to another, but imagine that one way is to copy it to an external drive and then move it from there to the new machine. That's got to be faster via FW800, USB3 or Thunderbolt than going over wifi??

I've since switched to Lightroom, but I recall that if you didn't use Aperture to "hold" your photos, the library file is much smaller and is just more of a reference of where the pictures actually are, and how they're organized.

Did you buy a new Mac? When I did so, I think Aperture migrated to my new machine using the standard Apple old-Mac to new-Mac process.

[joosttx]

I've since switched to Lightroom, but I recall that if you didn't use Aperture to "hold" your photos, the library file is much smaller and is just more of a reference of where the pictures actually are, and how they're organized.

Did you buy a new Mac? When I did so, I think Aperture migrated to my new machine using the standard Apple old-Mac to new-Mac process.

No my wife gave me her Mac Pro s my mini is running too slow.

[j44ke]

I'd go get an external drive that is twice the size of your Aperture library. Since you will be using a laptop, I would get a bus-powered drive that has a high access speed. I think 7200 is still the fastest right now.

Aperture and iPhoto create "packages" that hold your images and any edits of those images and whatever other gobbledygook is associated with the care and feeding of your photo library. Those are kept in your (older operating system) Photos folder or (newer operating system) Pictures folder if I am remembering correctly. You won't see your images listed in the typical folder hierarchy, just an icon that says Aperture Library. If you right click this icon and select "Show Package Contents", the library will open into a standard looking folder hierarchy and then you should eventually be able to find the original photos in the depths of a folder called "Masters".

That's if you've left checked the preference "Copy photos to Aperture Library" upon import. If you unchecked this box, then you probably put the photos in a folder somewhere on your hard drive, then opened Aperture and told Aperture where the originals were located. Aperture left them there but created a reference link to the originals while putting the editing information in the Aperture Library package. That makes moving things slightly more complicated, but not horribly so. Since you cannot find your photos, I figure that you haven't done things this way.

So what you do is find your Aperture Library Package and drag it to the external drive and drop it there. The computer will copy the Aperture Library Package from your machine's drive to the external drive, which usually takes a while. Then when the external is finished, plug it into your laptop.

At this point, you can decide whether to put the Aperture Library on your laptop or leave it on the external drive. If you want to put the Aperture Library on the laptop, first rename the library to something like "Mini Aperture Library" or "Pick This Aperture Library" or something equally obvious. Then drag the Aperture Library Package from the external drive to the Pictures folder on the laptop's internal drive. If you want to keep the Aperture Library on the external drive, then just leave it there.

Next open Aperture while holding down the "Option" key. A pop-up window will appear asking you to select an Aperture Library. It should show the default Aperture library that Aperture created the first time you opened the program. To get Aperture to use the library you brought over from your other computer, click "Other library" and select the transferred library from your other computer wherever you have put it.

That should do it. All your photos should appear as if they'd always been there, though there may be a delay as Aperture reads edit info and builds thumbnails, etc.

I use an external drive for the library (in my case, the Lightroom library) because then it is machine independent and I can choose to leave it in a safe place (and back it up with my desktop) rather than losing it on an airplane or when my laptop disappears. As long as there is a copy of Lightroom on the machine, I can connect my drive, open the program with the option key down and select the library. I also use it with my MacBook Air with its SSD, because then I'm not mucking up its relatively tiny drive with a lot of photos and I'm not wearing it out as fast with a lot of read-write operations as I do edits. Having the external does, however, decrease portability of the Air, so I have made a library on the Air called "Travel Photos". Then when I travel, I use that library instead of the external drive, copying everything over to the drive when I get back home. If I turn on the laptop without the external connected, the program asks me to select a library and then I can either connect the external and restart the program or use the Travel Photos library. My goal is to have as few irreplaceable things on my laptop as possible.