Luckily with Aperture 3 it’s easy to determine the status of a photo using the Smart Album.

Simply create a new Smart Album and select “Add Rule” and select the “File Status” rule.  From there you can select whether you want the Smart Album to include Managed or Referenced files.  Close the Rules and name your Smart Album something useful such as “Managed Files” and you can instantly see which files are still managed or Referenced.

Don’t let your harddrive fill up past 60-70% of it’s capacity. Aperture libraries will always fragment to some extent.  It’s the simple matter of an application writing to a disk, finding free space on the harddrive to store additional files and save changes.  When the harddrive has more free space it’s easier to find a spot to store files and write changes.  As the harddrive loses free space it’s harder to find free space and takes more time and effort to do so, thus slowing Aperture down.

Always work from a freshly formatted volume. As you continue working with an Aperture library, it will continue to fragment over and over again.  Once you copy the Aperture library to another harddrive, it essentially defragments the file, filling the largest space on the harddrive before filing the rest of the data in any free space it can find.  If you start with a freshly formatted harddrive and then copy the Aperture library to that drive, it will start filling up space from the beginning and should have little to no fragmentation.  This will make Aperture work less (well your hardware will work less anyway) and should increase the speed and efficiency of Aperture.

If you can’t/don’t want to always work from a freshly formatted volume, defrag. Since working from a freshly formatted volume essentially will help with fragmentation, the second best solution would be to use a program such as Tech Tool Deluxe or iDefrag to defrag the volume or Aperture library.

Picture are worth a thousand words …

Before

After

I started noticing that my Aperture library was really starting to slow down, almost to the point of wanting to pull my hair out, and this is working on a dual quad-core Mac Pro running at 2.8GHz.  This led me to start doing some research.  This first post will focus on Managed vs. Referenced files in regards to storing your Master files in Aperture.  My next post will deal with Library/File/Volume fragmentation and what the best strategy is to avoid having your Aperture library become fragmented, thus slowing it down.

A little background
We use Aperture almost exclusively to store, edit and process all of the photos that we shoot.  We, of course, shoot all our images in RAW, usually with a Canon 5D Mark II and as a result each of our files is typically ~30MB each.  Up to this point, I’ve allowed Aperture to manage all of our files which has generated a singular Aperture library that exceeds 500GB.  There are several reasons why this was a bad approach and I honestly just didn’t take the time to think it through when I initially setup Aperture (I think I was just too excited to get started).

So why is Managed bad?

1. Data isn’t segregated.  If you lose a harddrive or the Aperture library becomes corrupted for whatever reason, there is a good chance you could lose not only revisions (Versions) but possibly your Masters as well.  This clearly isn’t good.  By utilizing a Referenced setup, you can effectively store your Aperture Library on one volume and your Master files on another.  This gives you much greater flexibility and also much greater protection.
2. Backups take forever. This is primarily due to the file fragmentation which I’ll touch on in the next post.  Try copying a heavily fragmented file that’s over 500GB and you’ll quickly see that you don’t have 6 hours to sit and let it do it’s magic.

Possible Solutions
(Arranged in order of Safety and assuming you are using a non-expandable system such as an iMac, Macbook Air/Pro, etc.)

1. If you don’t want to deal with external harddrives on a constant basis you could essentially use your internal harddrive but simply partition it into 3 partitions.  One for your installation of OS X, one for the Aperture library and one for your Master files.  The only catch, is that you’d need to ensure you don’t fill any of the partitions more than 60-70% with files (more on the following post dealing with fragmentation).
2. Use an External Harddrive in the same manner as the internal except using 2 partitions, one for the library and one for the master files.
3. Use an External harddrive for your Master files and keep the Aperture library on your internal harddrive.  This will allow for good data segregation and also make it easier to backup both your Master files and library as there should be less fragmentation to deal with (Once again, more in the next post).
4. Use 2 external harddrives.  One would contain your Aperture library and the other would contain your master files.  This is probably the safest option as you have 3 independent drives allowing for more redundancy.

What I didn’t address was having an external RAID setup which would be the ideal solution so that you are constantly having backups made of both your Masters and library, but really when you start getting into it there are a lot of solutions you could come up with.

The main point here is to use Referenced Masters, not managed.