Ok so after installing Aperture 3.4.4, I noticed that when I was assigning names to faces, it would give me multiple options of the same name in a drop down menu. For example, lets say I start typing 'Joseph', multiple entries showed up, with only one being the 'real' one (with a contact image assigned).
Now I know this must be related to when I sometimes quickly assign a name and just hit enter it makes a new entry for that same face, kind of like I've clicked to fast for aperture to assign the name to an existing face name so it creates a new one. Usually I just merge the two by going to faces and dragging one on to the other. However, this may have caused multiple entries in a database somewhere that are showing up in 3.4.4 when I assign names.
Ok so I try repairing the library to no avail. So next, I try rebuild, which I know does a restore of the faces database. I know this takes ages as it starts chewing ram and swap space until I run out of HD and my machine crawls to a standstill as per my last try:
http://www.apertureexpert.com/forum-user/post/1981998
So I gave it a lot of time.
This time, however, it took 40 hours to finish rebuilding. After I had to reboot to reclaim my swap space. The aperture library grew by 5GB, as it mysteriously does after every rebuild I've noticed. Then opening it, it is trying to do a places lookup, but seems to have hanged. Again it's taking up swap space again.
And my aperture library space is increasing again.
Are others having issues with extremely large libraries? Mine's 550GB.
As part of my ongoing issues with HD space, I was wondering if it is a good idea to just move my library to an external drive and run it from an external. Is performance a lot worse if I do that? Is it recommended practice? Can you just drag a library to another location and just open it?
I dont use faces or places for fear of slowing down the work flow. However I can comment on moving your 500GB (Managed?) library to an external drive. Get a HD that 2TB in size and only use it for Aperture. That way you can defrag it occasionally or Rebuild it. Both of those procedures work well with lots of extra space to move temp files around. I use iDefrag but there are others. Seems like I rebuild about every two months and idefrag ever 6 months. With only Ap on the hard drive and lots of room you’ll have less defraging and Rebuilding … in theory. Cheers
davidbmoore@mac.com
Twitter= @davidbmoore
Scottsdale AZ
Thanks for the input. So a rebuild actually uses HD space on that drive?
Hmm. It may be the way to go. I can just move a library across to another drive? Does the external need to have permissions enabled?
External needs to be apple formatted Journal + or something like that. Get 2 new ones one for backup, and make sure they are usb3 for the future. Or in you other post you mentioned a new machine. 16 GB ram min and the biggest video card ram you can afford, then you can consider external thunderbolt drives latter on.
Yes just copy it over to the other correctly formatted drive. Happy to spend your money!
davidbmoore@mac.com
Twitter= @davidbmoore
Scottsdale AZ
Ha!
Thanks.
I think for now I’m going to buy a larger internal and do a restore from an older time machine before I rebuilt my library. The rebuild didn’t solve my issue any way, and I need some more space for now, so hopefully it will work out.
For the record, I found a solution to my “multiple faces entries”.
So it would seem that my faces database somehow has multiple entries for certain people. I noticed this when I would occasionally type in a name into the face box, and hit enter before it came up with the suggested names. For example, let’s say I was naming “John”. I enter John, but before his name would come up, I hit enter.
It would then create a new person called “John”. Previously I merged the two in the main faces tab by dragging one john onto the other.
No problem.
But then from Aperture 3.4.4, I noticed it would then suddenly have multiple entries for “john” in the suggested list. It would seem that some database somewhere would remember that I had once had separate entries for John.
So my solution was this:
Select one of the empty entires for John when naming, and re-merge as I did previously. This got rid of that entry.