I recently started dividing my Aperture work between my home iMac, and my MacBook Pro. The problem here is that, whenever I want to do a makeshift sync, I export the edited photos from one Mac as an Aperture library (to keep all adjustments, as well as the original image format), and then import the library into the second computer. This is slow, inefficient, and needlessly cumbersome.
I considered using Photo Stream, but the 25 GB I have on my iCloud (which will shrink to 5 a year from now) is nowhere near enough to house my colossal Aperture library, which should break the 100 GB milestone in a month or two; not to mention, using Photo Stream uses up Internet bandwidth, and flattens the images (merges the adjustments, instead of preserving them as editable ones).
Has anyone else had this kind of problem? Can anyone think of a solution?
Best Answer
RSync the library from the one system to the other when you're at home. It's network efficient, only transfers updated files, and is designed with exactly this sort of thing in mind. It's also free, and installed by default on OSX. It's a command-line tool, as long as you're happy with that sort of thing. It'll keep the libraries in sync quite happily, and syncs both ways.
You'll want something like:
rsync -avh --progress --delete /path/to/source /path/to/target
Depends on whether you mount the remote drive locally, or use an rsync daemon.
Nice instructions here: Software to synchronize two directories (local/remote)