Anders,

Congratulations on the new iMac! 27 inches of screen sure is glorious, isn’t it? ;-)

You’re half-way there already. You’ve copied the Library, but now you need to copy the referenced masters. They are probably located in your Pictures folder, but only you will know where they are actually stored. However, if you’re intending to keep all the masters on the same hard drive, then there’s no advantage to working “referenced”. Until you need to start using external drives to store masters, you may as well work “managed”.

I would recommend that you first migrate to Managed on the MacBook Air, then copy the newly managed library to the iMac.

To do that, open Aperture on the MacBook Air, and select the Projects view, then from the File menu, choose Consolidate Masters for Library… [screenshot]. This will move all the master images from wherever they are on the hard drive inside of the Aperture library.

Then, just to be safe, I’d recommend searching for any missing master files. The easiest way to do this is to [screenshot] 1. Select the Photos view, 2. Open the search filter, 3. add the rule “File Status”, and then 4. set the status to “Referenced” and then also check “offline” and also “missing”. You should show zero results in all of those searches, which will tell you that all images are managed (i.e. none are referenced) and all images are online (i.e. none are offline) and obviously that none are missing. If you do have results in any of these searches, then select the photo and you’ll need to open the menu File > Locate Referenced Files and reconnect through there. If you get to that point and need assistance, just ask.

Once you’re satisfied that your entire Library has been successfully converted to Managed, then copy that Library to your iMac. Before you do, you can delete the Library you’ve already copied.

Doing it in this order will save the hassle of trying to reconnect masters on the iMac, which on occasion is problematic. Since you already have a working Library on the MacBook Air, let’s do this the easy way and not do something that could introduce problems you’ll have to fix later.

By the way, at any point if you do outgrow the disk space on the iMac, or for any reason do want to go back to working Referenced, you can at any time relocate the masters using the command File > Relocate Masters, and again here you can do it for the entire Library, or for individual Projects.

Enjoy!

Anders,

My pleasure! SugarSync looks pretty cool; I’m a hardcore Dropbox user but SugarSync looks cool too. I keep almost my entire documents folder in there, all client info, and a lot more.

Good luck this weekend, and if you run into any issues, we’ll be here!