Go DSLR…bringing Digital Photography to the masses

I got a lot of reader feedback very shortly after the last article was published (Part 2: Importing!) since there seems to be a lot of confusion about file referencing and what it actually means. This article, named part 2.5: File Referencing, is meant as an addition to the Aperture File Management series but as a supplement and not really as a standalone part as it only contains information, not a a tutorial.

This article is part of a series and will be available as a PDF download when completed.
The parts are:

• Part 1: The basics
• Part 2: Importing – Import presets
• Part 2.5: File Referencing – Master files
• Part 3: Key-wording, Metadata and Smart Albums
• Part 4: Advanced Topics for power users
• Part 4.5: Customizing Apple Keyboard shortcuts
• Part 5: Conclusion, reflection and review

1. What is Referencing?

Ok, this article will be slightly technical but I try to write it as detailed as possible.

Everyeone talks about referencing master files in digital asset managment platforms but unless you start reading and searching heavily, noone really explains to you what it is as does.

To put it all simply and in a nutshell, Referencing files is to work with COPIES of the original files and in doing so, preserving the original file as a master file that you can always work from again. This has the distinct advantage that you can create multiple copies of the same master file and apply completely different changes to them. I tried to illustrate this in the following figure:

Aperture 3 works ALWAYS with reference files of photos, even when you just let Aperture itself manage the library so referencing is not something you enable, it is built into the software.

2. Referencing master files

Now that we know what referencing is, let’s move to working with referencing Masters.

Aperture 3 (as well as older versions) takes some time until the photo becomes sharp in the library while importing. This is because Aperture generates thumbnails or small jpg copies of your master files and create your working copies. Now the feature that is mostly overlooked and one of the focus points of part 2 of this article series is that you can have your Master files anywhere you choose because Aperture will work only with working copies once the import is done. Effectively you can have all your master files offline from then on and you will still be able to work (you do have to have them online when you export the photo though).

So, in short, when you import in Aperture you can tell Aperture 3 to save your master files somewhere else than in the library, which of course makes the library faster and smaller, and in doing so back the files up in your own way or have someone else also work with the masters.

3. Working with the referenced Masters

This last part deals with backups. The amount of digital photos that people accumulate nowadays is quite large and all too many families have shed a tear or two when the family’s PC fails or had a crashed harddrive and everything is gone. With the prices of external USB disks nowadays dropping into nowhere, there is NO excuse not to have one and backing your photos up.

Aperture 3 allows you to constantly back up the Aperture library into something called Vaults. These are basically incremental copies of your Aperture library. This means that the software will not constantly re copy the same library but instead only the changed or new files. On your backup disk, your backups will then consume the same amount of diskspace as your original library. This is great but if you have your master files inside the Aperture library, it will take a large amount of diskspace and probably a very long time every time you back up into your vault.

Using Vaults

You can easily back up using vaults as long as you have a disk attached or space enough to save the data to. To save in a vault, simply click on the little gear icon at the bottom left side in Aperture 3 and then click on ADD VAULT.

You will then presented with the following notification window:

Once you click continue you will be asked to set the location of your vault. You should add this to an external disk, to be sure it is safe, and name it the same than your Aperture library.

After you created the vault, you will have a new addition at the bottom left side which is just the vault name and location. If the disk is online, upon exiting Aperture3, the vault will be updated automatically. You can also launch the update manually by clicking on the red circle arrows. Depending on the size of your library, this can take a lot of time.

Please note that vaults will only backup what is located in your Aperture 3 library and NOT any reference masters outside of this. If you use Apple’s Time Machine (you should anyway) to backup your Mac regularly, then you don’t have to do anything else as your Masters are being backed up as part of your system backup. You can, however save your Masters on an external disk right away as well. This is a single point of failure then though since if that external disk stops working, all your masters are gone. You should have them at least in two locations, one location and one backup.

Relocating Masters

Many of you probably have already photos in your Aperture library. If you still want to implement referenced Masters  and relocate them, it is not a problem. first you need to select a project or several photos and then click on FILE -> RELOCATE MASTERS.

In the next window you are asked where the Masters should be moved to. This is the harddrive location and if you look at the menu items below the folder selection, you will see that you can have the same presets that you created in the IMPORT in Part 2 of the Article series. You can also rename the files based on your presets.

As you can see, the Aperture presets are re-usalbe throughout the program and once you have created your workflow and pre-defined all the aspects, working will become much much smoother and more efficient.

3.RECAP

We now went through a little more than I thought in the beginning. Not only did we look at what reference files and masters are, we also went through backing up and even relocating Masters that are already in your library. By refencing you  can shrink your library and hard drive space on your system disk, if that is where you have your files located.