Aperture library residing on an external drive
© Apple Computers
The other day I had to collect the pictures of FriScènes, a local theater festival. I freed up some 20 GB on my internal hard drive, and collected about as much data of raw photos in Aperture. After the festival I created a backup of the files on my external hard drive, and copied the aperture library also to the external drive (kind of unnecessary, but you never know).
Some days later I needed to access the photos of the festival. But Aperture (v2.1.4) won't let me set the Library path to the external drive, and I couldn't copy it back on the internal either due to lack of free space.
So after some fiddling in the terminal I found a way to leave the photo files on the external drive and access them anyways with Aperture:
- copy the .aplibrary folder and all the files in it to your internal harddrive except the .approject files
- create a symlink on your internal drive pointing to your external drive
In my case, the commands where the following:
cd /Users/damian/Pictures/
cp -rv /Volumes/wd590/Aperture\ Library\ FriScenes.aplibrary .
(which I interrupted with CTRL-C when I saw it copied actual image files)
cd Aperture\ Library\ FriScenes.aplibrary
rm -r *.approject
ln -s /Volumes/wd590/Aperture\ Library\ FriScenes.aplibrary/*.approject .
This works fine, though the slower performance of the USB drive causes the thumbnails to appear one after another (instead of appearing instantly when running from the interal drive.)
