I have been doing some research about the best way to go about sharing my extensive aperture library (192GB) which is on my imac desktop with my new MacBook Pro. I do not want my entire aperture library on my laptop so I decided to make a copy of my aperture library to an external hard drive. Okay, great. When I attach the external hard drive to my MBP it immediately opens up aperture and I can see all of my photos and just as if I am on my desktop. Then when I am finished remove external hard drive and my lap top is once again empty of space.
Problem: How do I go about updating my external hard drive with just “new” photos I have uploaded to Aperture? Seems tedious. I do not know how to do this. Do I create a file on my desktop and export photos from Aperture to the desktop file? I need step by step directions on how to do this. Can this be done by project? All my photos are very organized and I want it to be this way on my external hard drive too.
Also, have thought about using dropbox as a way of viewing my photos from one device to another. But Dropbox will not read my jpeg files from my aperture library. I tried and I just got lists of numbers on the screen.
So do I need to transfer what photos I want to see from my aperture library to a file on my desktop and THEN transfer them into Dropbox? Will they then be visible in my Dropbox file? And will they still be organized by each project as they were in Aperture?
Thank you for any help. Am new to all this and need very specific directions.
Saribrose
Icloud is not an option as it only holds 50BG max of storage. I also do not want it to start pushing photos to my other devices and taking up space.
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Using Dropbox as a way of sharing photos instead of icloud
#1
You may not like this suggestion, but if you plan to have a common library shared across multiple systems then you might be better off storing the master library on the external disk and using it from there. Yes, it can only be accessible to one system at a time, but is that really a problem? It would solve your issue of keeping multiple copies in sync.
I have one master external disk and three backup copies. I keep the backup copies in sync using “rsync” from a Terminal window, but there are other more user friendly ways such as ChronoSync, SuperDuper!, etc. When I make significant changes to the master library, I sync the master drive to all three backup drives. When I need my library I plug the master drive into the machine I plan to use. The drive is a 1TB USB3 drive that is powered over USB so I don’t have to worry about extra power cables. My master library is a managed library, not referenced, so I always know my images are with the library.
I do not use Aperture Vaults for backups. They only let you restore the entire library at a time. With my backup copies I can open any of them and export accidentally deleted images from a backup library into a separate library, then import the library of deleted images back into the Master library. I don’t have to worry about mucking up the backup library from this operation. The next time I sync from the master to the backup copies all will be perfectly in sync again.
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