Hi all.

My platform is an older MacBook Pro, so I’m kinda stuck at Snow Leopard and have purchased Aperture 3.  My photo library is already organised into a folder hierarchy by years and dates, on the household NAS, and I’m trying to import it as Referenced rather than eat up space on my internal drive.  I have read a little about importing and am trying the “import folders as projects” route so that I can ingest a whole hierarchy in one operation.  I have checked the “leave in their current locations” option.

So… I have maybe 80,000 images of moderate size (not very high res).  On first attempt, the import ran for 18 hours and used up all the memory on my MacBook (even with other large apps shut down):  by the next morning it was clearly in terminal swap frenzy with 10M memory free and the “rainbow lollipop” busy cursor, not responding.  I sent the Aperture process a HUP and did some online reading to see if I could find a better way to do the import.

I tried setting the app to start in 32 bit mode (this was recommended in some venues as a cure for very slow imports).  I then tried opt-cmd-click on the Ap Library icon to force a library rebuild.  I did not get the expected Repair Library dialogue.  Instead, Ap went back to “Processing”.  I cancelled that task via the task listbox, and tried “Delete Folder” in the hope of starting over.  No dice:  Ap went off the rails again, busied out and would not respond to any further input (no confirm dialogue for the delete ever came up).

So far I have to admit I’m a little frustrated.  Must I really import the library in smaller chunks, manually?  How many days or weeks may I expect this to take?  How long *should* it take to import 80K files (only 39GB of image data!)?  What should I do now, to start over with a better prospect of success? 

I would rather use Ap than LR because I’m more into organising, albums, book production etc than into heavy post processing, and I like the “referenced” option which suits my workflow.  But so far it appears rather painful and frustrating to try to get Ap to recognise the existing photo library.  Previously I was a Picasa user, and that was fine until I moved photos to the NAS :-)  Picasa does not respond well (understatement)  to having any part of its library come and go with network interruptions.  I was hoping Aperture would solve that problem.  I still hope it can.

Can anyone help me with a “best practise” for getting Ap 3 (fully updated for Snow Leopard) to import a large number of smallish images w/o running right out of RAM and going catatonic?

tia

de (feeling like I’m trapped in Aperture Labs)