Changing the Location of a Master

At times, you may want to move some master images to a new location outside your Aperture Library.

For example, let's say that you have finished your edits to the Lesson08 project and now want to archive the project on a CD-ROM for long-term storage. You don't have enough space to keep the masters in your Library, but you don't want to throw them away. Consequently, CD or DVD archiving is a great way to go.

You could simply export the project, burn it on a disc, and delete it from your Aperture Library, but in this case you want to keep it in your Library so you can continue to search and browse the images.

Note

You'll need a blank CD to perform this exercise.

1.	Open Disk Utility, which is located in ~/Applications/Utilities. You will use Disk Utility to create a disk image for your master images, and then burn that disk image to a CD or DVD.
2.	In Disk Utility, click the New Image button at the top of the Disk Utility window.
3.	Set the Size pop-up menu to 610 MB. Leave the Encryption and Format menus set to their defaults.
4.	In the Save As field, enter Lesson 08 Masters, and set the Where pop-up menu to Desktop.
5.	Click Create. Disk Utility will create a new disk image and mount it on your desktop.

A mounted image is virtual disk. As far as the computer is concerned, Lesson 08 Masters is just like any other writable volume (hard drive, USB drive, etc.) that you might attach to your Mac. Now let's write some data to this virtual disk.

1.	In Aperture, go to the Projects panel and select the Lesson08 First Import project.
2.	Click in the Browser and then press Command-A to select all of the images in the project.
3.	Choose File > Relocate Masters. A Save dialog will appear.
4.	Select the Lesson 08 Masters disk image you just created. Using the Subfolder Format and Name Format menus, you can choose to have Aperture automatically create a special folder to save your masters in. We're fine with the defaults.
5.	Click Relocate Masters. Aperture will spend some time copying your masters.
6.	Switch to the Finder and open the Lesson 08 Masters disk image. You should see 32 items.
7.	In Disk Utility, select the Lesson 08 Masters.dmg item in the left pane, then click the Burn icon at the top of the window. The images total about 350 MB. When the CD is burned, Aperture will mount it on your desktop. You'll now see two volumes with the same name. One is the CD you just burned; the other is the virtual disk.
8.	In the Finder, eject the disk image volume called Lesson 08 Masters.
9.	Move the Lesson 08 Masters.dmg file to the Trash and empty the Trash.

Return to Aperture and explore your project. Note that all the images are now listed as references. If you check the original location of any of the images, you'll see that Aperture lists them as being stored on the virtual disk you just copied them to.

Note that you have successfully moved your master data to another volume (you could have also used a DVD if your images were too big to fit on a CD), and yet they're still visible in your Aperture Library because Aperture preserved the necessary links. You can rate them, add metadata, sort them, even view full-resolution previews.

The ability to move your masters around in this way gives you a tremendous level of power and control. You can arrange your Library to suit your storage capabilities, offloading some masters to CDs, DVDs, or hard disks, and keeping others on your local hard disk. No matter where they are, though, you'll always have a full-resolution preview and a record of where the original is.

However, note that it is possible to break the link to a file.