I have spent most of my photography time the last two weeks or so recovering from running out of space on my iMac. I got a warning from Aperture during an upload that I was in danger of corrupting my library. Scary.

What I did first was to go through and delete images that were crap. I have been lazy – space is cheap right? I had not ditched pictures that were extremely underexposed, or out of focus, or had people heads chopped off. I went through most of the pictures of the 2007/2008 and got rid of them. That was time consuming.

Next was to migrate my referenced images to external drives. I decided to reformat my two FreeAgent 320G drives to HFS+ and move all my images that are stored as reference over. It took longer than I thought. I couldn’t find a way to do it other than to “Relocate Masters” one project at a time. I couldn’t select more than that.

After a couple of days of doing that, I was able to copy all the images to drive #2. I then created two new vaults, and put the first on drive #1, and the second on drive #2. I now have complete duplicates of my images and my library on two separate drives. Drive #2 is off site at work.

I haven’t done any big uploads since to know if that process will be any slower, now that the images are on a USB connected external drive. We’ll see.