Howto: Merge Aperture Libraries

At one point not too long ago I had three computers, and two external hard drives. Now I have just one Macbook Pro, and four external hard drives. Somewhere between running out of space on some drives, not having external drives always with me, etc… I ended up with around FIVE Aperture libraries. That’s not really useful. Apple has no ‘easy’ built in way for merging Aperture libraries. I couldn’t find anything decent online, asides from exporting and importing them into different libraries. That seemed silly, and painstaking. I have around just 100Gb of photos at the moment, but that makes it a pain still in 5 libraries. So I figured it out! Well, I just figured it out and this is still an ‘at your own risk’ operation. Remember kids, backing up is cool. Losing data isn’t. Don’t blame me if this screws up.

1. Find what library you want to merge everything to. Set that as the library that Aperture will use, under the Preferences pane in Aperture. Easy enough. Close Aperture.
2. Find that library on your hard drive. Right click on it and go to “Show Package Contents”. This will open a new window and you’ll see lots of .approject files in there. Each one has the name of the projects in that library.  Leave this open.
3. Now find the library that you want to merge from. Again, do the “Show Package Contents” thing.
4. Find the Projects that you want to move over (specified by the .approject ending). Drag them over to the Library that you want which you opened in Step 2. Notice that we haven’t had to open Aperture yet.
5. After it’s copied you can close all of the windows. Now open Aperture. It will pop up with a little error that says unknown items have been found in the library. It should give all of the project names of those that you copied over. Hit “Recover Now”. It will do it’s thing for a few seconds (maybe longer depending how many you have) and then pop up another prompt that says it’s done. Hit ok.
6. Boom! That’s it! Libraries merged. IF everything works ok, then you can delete the OLD library file.

UPDATE: This is no longer the case with Aperture 2.x. Aperture 2.x handles things very differently, but it seems much easier too. I actually have about 3 new libraries that I need to merge, so I’ll post that technique later (hopefully soon).

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 13th, 2007 at 9:40 pm and is filed under photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.