Thread: Possibility of editing directly from external hard drive?

Just a word of warning that a single storage location (internal or external) should be supported by at least one backup located on another medium (a separate HDD or DVDs). I've had one external drive die on me but I restored most of my collection from CDs/DVDs. If your a pro or a paranoid amateur then a third backup stored off site (at work or a relative's house) is recommended.

The danger here is in over thinking it.

Put simply, in most ways simply consider your external drive as being an extension of your computer.

In Aperture or Lightroom you need to let the application know where to place the images.

Plug in your external drive.

Then navigate to this link, and follow the instructions in the first section (title: To create a new, empty library file in a new location).

From then on, Aperture will store your photos on the external drive, and pull / return them to the drive when editing.

Aperture 3 User Manual

Note: you will have only one copy of your photos. Dangerous. When you can, get another drive for a backup.

Originally Posted by winginkris

Can someone explain how this is done? I'm using an iMac with Aperture.

Kris

In Aperture on the top menu go to File>Relocate Masters and select you external hard drive and a folder location this will moves all masters out of the Library. Next when you import your images select the folder on the hard drive and you images will automatically be stored there (you should only have to do this once). After that Aperture will handle all you images and the process will be transparent to you.

All that being said you should back up this folder to another hard drive for safety.

Thanks Pelao and Grant. I managed to get them relocated. Now all my photos have a box and an arrow pointing to the upper right in the lower right hand corner. I'm assuming this is telling me that the master is in another place. Also, I tried to import a photo from my sd card and I believe it went to my external drive. Actually, I checked the drive and it was there, so I'm hoping all is well.

So now I just use Aperture the same as always but the Masters are stored on the external drive by default and what I see in my "projects" are basically shortcuts to the masters?

Thanks to both of you for your help!!!

Kris

Kris

You are correct in you assumption of the box and arrow. It simply means the files are Referenced instead of Managed and are somewhere else than in Apertures Library. In your case on and external hard drive. Aperture will maintain all the Donkey work associated with these files, with the exception of backing them up. This you will have to do on your own. Good luck as you should have no problems!

I also use a service called Cabonite which automatically backs up my entire computer daily. I just checked their website and the service doesn't back up external drives. I'm going to get a second hard drive as a back up just in case.

Originally Posted by bilzmale

Just a word of warning that a single storage location (internal or external) should be supported by at least one backup located on another medium (a separate HDD or DVDs). I've had one external drive die on me but I restored most of my collection from CDs/DVDs. If your a pro or a paranoid amateur then a third backup stored off site (at work or a relative's house) is recommended.

Oh YES! I don't go so far as to have an offsite store but on my Mac I use Carbon Copy Cloner for the internal drive to an external, and I have two additional external drives, one of which is a clone of the other, thanks to CCC. Carbon Copy cloner is donationware or free with advertising. the ads are no big deal. Also, its set and forget, and if your internal drive dies, you can boot from the clone. I currently have two cloned drives for the internal because I've recently begun beta testing for Mountain Lion, so I'm using a different clone drive for that than I had for Lion.

I'm not sure how CCC will cope with cloning a drive attached to my AEBS which will be my next step in making my iphoto and itunes libraries available to both my iMac and MBP (running two of each seems just silly) but I'll be setting that up today, all other things being equal.

I've been caught with my pants down, as it were, in the past, and have lost thousands of photographs because of it. Never again. And because drives dont last forever, the ones I am using now, will be replaced before much longer.