Syncing Aperture between Macs

Question

I recently started dividing my Aperture work between my home iMac, and my MacBook Pro. The problem here is that, whenever I want to do a makeshift sync, I export the edited photos from one Mac as an Aperture library (to keep all adjustments, as well as the original image format), and then import the library into the second computer. This is slow, inefficient, and needlessly cumbersome.

I considered using Photo Stream, but the 25 GB I have on my iCloud (which will shrink to 5 a year from now) is nowhere near enough to house my colossal Aperture library, which should break the 100 GB milestone in a month or two; not to mention, using Photo Stream uses up Internet bandwidth, and flattens the images (merges the adjustments, instead of preserving them as editable ones).

Has anyone else had this kind of problem? Can anyone think of a solution?

Answer 1

RSync the library from the one system to the other when you're at home. It's network efficient, only transfers updated files, and is designed with exactly this sort of thing in mind. It's also free, and installed by default on OSX. It's a command-line tool, as long as you're happy with that sort of thing. It'll keep the libraries in sync quite happily, and syncs both ways.

You'll want something like:

rsync -avh --progress --delete /path/to/source /path/to/target

Depends on whether you mount the remote drive locally, or use an rsync daemon.

Nice instructions here: Software to synchronize two directories (local/remote)

Answer 2

Another possibilty is to keep your aperture library on an external disk. You move the disk from computer to computer. This avoids the sync problem, as well as the possibility that you overwrite new edits with older versions if you forget which one is the most current.

Note that USB 2 is probably too slow to work with. Firewire 2 is probably acceptable. USB 3, thunderbolt, or esata will depend on the capabilities of your macs, but you can get enclosures that support multiple kinds of connections.