How to shrink Aperture Library

[HDFan]

One of my many failed attempts to migrate my entire Aperture library had me build full size previews and export them. This was to save edited photos since lightroom doesn't see them. I'm not sure if this is the one that did it, but my Aperture library ballooned from 71 GB to 125 GB. Right now it is sitting at 150 GB which is 15% of my 1 TB SSD. I later tried to reduce the preview size but it didn't seem to make much of a difference.

Right now my preview settings are half size previews and quality 8. I'm wondering what settings would give good results while previewing/editing but would reduce the size of my library. My pictures directory by (by reference, on an external disk) is ~2 TB with ~110,000 photos. Only 79K of these are in Aperture as I've been adding new shoots to Lightroom.

 

[The Bad Guy]

Delete the crap ones.

 

[Ray2]

Two choices I can think of:

Lightroom, if set accordingly, will build full size previews for any Aperture edited image. So you could trash all your Aperture previews and have no effect on the final outcome. When you import into LR, you will then spend days sorting through them and putting them where they belong (they all show up in one folder).

Or, by folder, export just the edited raws you want to keep as tiff or JPEG back into their respective folders, delete all previews and import library into Lightroom without selecting whatever the option is called to build full sized AperturePreviews. I did this after the approach you and I first picked was a mess. I did it for all 4 and 5 star rated images. Very few in my case, perhaps a couple of hundred.

The above was seamless and once done, no additional work.