This is a series of short articles about how to protect referenced masters from one of their worst natural enemies: bone-headedness. From Part 1: The best medicine, then, is prevention. So how do you go about protecting referenced masters? They could be stored anywhere and called anything -- what kind of barriers can be constructed to protect them?

Part 3: Organize Masters For Growth

Relocating and renaming masters imported into Aperture helps to ensure that they will not be accidently altered, misplaced, or deleted as referenced files.

But when they are relocated, where should they be put? Everyone has a different system for doing this. Often that system arose from a need to either find images or process them, but these are requirements that Aperture does not have of disk storage: the library and its tools take over that organizational role.

What is left to organize? There must be some logic to the folder structure. My answer is to organize around change and minimize risk. What can change?

Adding Storage

The first thing that changes is that the disk fills up and more is needed. Unless you have a RAID system that can be transparently expanded, you must either add a new disk to your computer and split the masters across both, or replace the old disk with the new one and copy everything over. Which is the better approach depends on how the masters have been organized, so ideally your master organization is planned according to your plans for expansion. Do you have any plans for expansion?

If you are storing referenced masters primarily chronologically, say by month, then you add a new drive and all the new images get put on the new drive and the old ones stay on the old drive. It's a quick upgrade and you are unlikely to accidently delete or damage anything. Further, you can stop backing up the old drive: it will never change. Just keep the old off-site back up until you get rid of the smaller drive a few years from now. One small catch is that the addition of the new drive will happen mid-month. So do you have two July folders, one on each disk, or move the July folder to the new disk and then continue adding to it? I recommend the latter, and will be looking at how that can be achieved in this article.

If you are not storing referenced masters primarily chronologically, then the approach is different. Masters organized by client and then by project cannot be handled the same way as the strictly chronological system because any client could ask for another project and overrun an already-full disk. In this case it makes sense to copy everything over and stop using the old disk. Copying between disks can take a little while, even with fast disks -- about an hour per 100GB -- so this is something that may take some planning. The catch with this method of storage expansion is that backing up will need to include both drives now, so don't forget to change your settings or procedures to do that.

Both method of adding storage require copying, and Aperture can do it for you. In fact you should always use Aperture to do the copying. In that way Aperture always knows where its library masters are at all times and reconnecting is never needed.

To move referenced masters to another drive using Aperture, relocate them using exactly the same system of organization that was in use on the old drive. You already have a preset for this because the current organization or referenced masters was built with it.

Archiving

In deciding how to organize referenced masters there is more to consider than just storage expansion. The other change that occurs is that archiving is needed: some images no longer need to be at-hand and can be stored more cheaply or in a place that is not immediately available. These are not back-ups (copies stored short-term as insurance that you hope to never need) -- they are archives (originals stored long-term with the expectation that they will be needed).

I described one folder systems based primarily on date, and another based on client and project. But there are others. Which one is best? In my mind the best folder system is one that Aperture can create and maintain and that can be adequately backed up incrementally.

That may sound restrictive because you may not want to look at a library organized that way, but remember that the folder organization on the disk does not have to follow the library organization at all. For instance your library may be organized by client and then city (both using blue folders) and then by project because your work involves travel to different locations for each client to shoot vacation accommodation. But since renovation is common, you almost never need access to images that are more than three years old. So you organize your referenced masters on the disk by year and project (using Finder folders) and archive a whole year at a time to DVDs or a hard drive each time you start a new year. Note that the library still contains the thumbnails and the metadata for all images, allowing you to view, tag, and find those other images at any time.

Organize masters to reflect how you archive images and manage storage. Organize the library to reflect how you find and work with images.

Part 4 has been posted.

Tags: Aperture, Masters, Referenced, Reconnecting, Bone-Headedness, Library