Aperture: Library over multiple Hard Drives

apertureexternal-diskhard drive

I switched to Aperture some time ago. And right now, the moment has come that I want to save some space on my internal hard drive. What I found on the Apple website is this:

Aperture: Multiple volumes

I can't seem to find this feature. Online tutorials simply suggest to create multiple libraries and switch between them. But I'm looking for the kind of solution that Apple suggests in this screenshot: I want to use Aperture with my library (one single big library) and Aperture manages where all pictures are stored, across the multiple hard drives. It should be something going on at the background, out of my knowledge. I just want to be the clueless user of the application.

Has anyone found how to do this?

Best Answer

This is a very easy operation that basically is one menu item away.

  • File -> Relocate Originals…

So, just connect whatever drive you want to store some photos on and select those photos (by project, album, smart folder, whatever) and then relocate them.

A standard file dialog will appear and you can move them to whatever folder you want on the other drive(s).

Aperture will then update the database and move the large / original version of each photo to the drive selected. When you are using aperture and the drive is not connected, you still have a preview version to work on / edit / crop / correct / etc… If you perform some operation where the original is needed, Aperture will ask nicely that you connect the drive, but for routine tasks - you may not even need the original version for daily use.