How to relocate masters in aperture from boot drive to external drive?

Question

I've seen discussions of how to locate offline files to move reference files to a different drive.

However, what if I want to move all the referenced files off of my boot drive (Pictures folder) to an external drive?

I noticed that the list view of files does not show the referenced file path (or is there a way to show this), and the smart folder option does not seem to allow filtering by the referenced file path.

Would it be easier to simply move the folder of files in the finder and then reconnect?

Answer 1

I think the easiest thing to do, as you already mentioned is to move masters to the external drive. It helps if you keep the folder structure intact, it will help Aperture during the reconnect proces.

So if you had something like ~/Pictures/masters/year/month/day, just move the masters folder to the new drive,

Then in the Library tab click on Photos, hit ctrl-6 (to show all photos), select all with cmd-a and go to File -> locate references files... and reconnect. If you click the reconnect all button, most likely they all will be reconnected and everything should be fine.

Note that I have seen, in particular with large libraries, that not all pictures get reconnected, just repeat the process if this happens.