Aperture to Photos and huge library file size

[Crazy Badger]

Given I was having issues with importing files into Aperture in the 10.13 PB, and Photos is one of the apps to see some improvements, I thought I'd take it for another spin.

Most of my ~35k pictures are referenced outside Aperture, but even so the library size was 55GB after some cleansing. When it had finished importing into Photos it was slightly smaller at just under 50GB.

I've been playing around with it for a couple of days, replicating some Smart Groups and checking star rating and keywords. Whilst it's still missing some of the stuff I regularly use in Aperture and I'll need to rethink my workflow for importing and backing up files, it might work.

That said, in the few days I've been playing, I've left it running so it would scan for people/faces and in that time the library has grown to over 130GB, and it still has about 8000 pictures to scan. Why is this, and will it drop back down once this is complete. More than double the file size of Aperture is crazy, which was pretty big given most of my original images sit outside the library as reference files.

I also did an import into Lightroom (the lack of iCloud is a problem) and that catalogue was less than 5GB!

Any ideas?

 

[Crazy Badger]

The more I play with Photos, the less I think Im going to be able to find an effective workflow.

In Aperture, I used to import files (usually from the card inserted into a USB reader) into the Aperture library, and at the same time back them up to a seperate folder on 2TB HDD. The 2TB HDD is backed up regularly to my NAS, so I have the pictures stored in at least 3 places.

Having the file in the Aperture Library running on a SSD made editing relatively quick, but eventually I'd start to run out of space, so would then relocate the older files to the 2TB HDD and at that point also remove the backups. I'd typically delete 20-30% of the photos imported into Aperture, so this process just left me with the keepers.

Whilst it appears I can stop Photos from importing new pictures into it's library, there's no way to move them out once they are in there, other than deleting them? So I could just work with the referenced files, but at the minute when I try and import them Photos just crashes. This could be down to the High Sierra PB, but it still appears to be lacking some of the key functionality for managing pictures.

Has anyone successfully moved across to Photos from Aperture and found a sensible workflow for managing photos inside and outside of the library?

 

[simonsi]

Has anyone successfully moved across to Photos from Aperture and found a sensible workflow for managing photos inside and outside of the library?

Nope, Photos was hugely feature-poor last time I looked at it, I took Apple's hint and moved to C1P a couple of years ago and never looked back. Photos doesn't see the light of day on my machines except when I connect a new digital image device Photos will come up, I will tell it not to import from that device automatically and I shut it down again.

 

[robgendreau]

There were some reports a long while ago that Photos had problems with referenced images in that the library grew disproportionately; might wanna check on that. And BTW, not a fair comparison with Lr: the Lr catalog, minus previews, is gonna be way smaller than a Photos library that is partially managed, since that Photos library contains original images.

As to the referenced images in Photos, I dunno why the crash. Try a new library and experiment. One big issue with referenced images is that Photos can't write metadata changes to those files. And it can't even delete them IIRC, or move them about. So it's rather tough to manage them externally as you did in Aperture. Sounds like an alternative would be more in tune with your workflow.