The Hazards of Referenced Masters -- Archives on DVDs
The introduction of referenced masters in Aperture 1.5 came to many people with a feeling of relief. I can keep my masters where I want them to be! I can burn masters to DVD for archiving! I can use all those Firewire drives to store my images! In other words, I can keep on working the way I used to work: manually organizing storage and applying a cataloging application to that storage so that it is possible to find things.
As people who have been emailing me are finding out, there are hazards to using referenced masters. Aperture is not a cataloging application like iView: it's a librarian and a workflow tool. And using it like it is a cataloging application is going to result in problems.
The difference between a library and a catalog is important. A catalog is part of a library and simply works as an index, telling you where things are. A library actually holds the things that are referenced by the catalog. In the case of Aperture there are two options for the library: either store the images in the same place as the catalog as managed masters and have Aperture do the work, or store the masters externally in other places as referenced masters and you do the work. What work? There's nothing to do. Right?
Let's say you have been shooting for years and have diligently been burning everything to DVDs and cataloging them with Aperture. The day comes when you want to upload all the five star images in your collection to pBase. You create a smart album for the whole library and make it select the five star images. All the thumbnails appear and you select them and go to export them. But:
Well that is because the disk with the images on is not in the drive. But which disk to use? Control-click on an image and try to open in the Finder helps a little:
But that is only the information about one image and I have hundreds spread across many DVDs. The Referenced File Manager is more of a help:
It at least shows me the volume names of the images I have selected, so I know which disks to put in.
But wait. To export all of my hundreds of five-star images in one go I must mount all of the DVDs that contain those images at the same time! So if I have five DVDs that contain the images, I need five DVD players all plugged into my computer at the same time. The same is true of Firewire disks. Unless I can mount all of them at once, I cannot export a selection of images that spans them.
There are two possible solutions. The first is to make the images managed just for the export and then relocate them again when done. That is easier said than done when the media is read-only. The second is to split the export up into chunks so that each chunk only uses one DVD. An equally large pain because I have to do that manually: there is no filter that lets me chop up the images into groups by storage volume.
I have described one of the hazards of referenced masters. You do have work to do, you may just not realize it yet.
As people who have been emailing me are finding out, there are hazards to using referenced masters. Aperture is not a cataloging application like iView: it's a librarian and a workflow tool. And using it like it is a cataloging application is going to result in problems.
The difference between a library and a catalog is important. A catalog is part of a library and simply works as an index, telling you where things are. A library actually holds the things that are referenced by the catalog. In the case of Aperture there are two options for the library: either store the images in the same place as the catalog as managed masters and have Aperture do the work, or store the masters externally in other places as referenced masters and you do the work. What work? There's nothing to do. Right?
Let's say you have been shooting for years and have diligently been burning everything to DVDs and cataloging them with Aperture. The day comes when you want to upload all the five star images in your collection to pBase. You create a smart album for the whole library and make it select the five star images. All the thumbnails appear and you select them and go to export them. But:
Well that is because the disk with the images on is not in the drive. But which disk to use? Control-click on an image and try to open in the Finder helps a little:
But that is only the information about one image and I have hundreds spread across many DVDs. The Referenced File Manager is more of a help:
It at least shows me the volume names of the images I have selected, so I know which disks to put in.
But wait. To export all of my hundreds of five-star images in one go I must mount all of the DVDs that contain those images at the same time! So if I have five DVDs that contain the images, I need five DVD players all plugged into my computer at the same time. The same is true of Firewire disks. Unless I can mount all of them at once, I cannot export a selection of images that spans them.
There are two possible solutions. The first is to make the images managed just for the export and then relocate them again when done. That is easier said than done when the media is read-only. The second is to split the export up into chunks so that each chunk only uses one DVD. An equally large pain because I have to do that manually: there is no filter that lets me chop up the images into groups by storage volume.
I have described one of the hazards of referenced masters. You do have work to do, you may just not realize it yet.
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