The problem is, you have to select which photos to relocate, and if you have thousands of photos, it’s hard to decide which to keep local, and which to put on an external drive.  So I came up with this technique. You don’t necessarily have to do it exactly like this, and you may use different criteria to pick your photos, but this was what worked for me.

First of all, you’ll need an external hard drive.  Storage is ridiculously cheap now.  I bought a LaCie 500 GB drive for $150.  Open up Aperture and create a new smart album.  We’re going to tell Aperture what photos we want to relocate to the external drive.  Whenever I take a batch of photos, I rate the keepers between 3 and 5 stars.  That way it’s easy to create smart albums for each event.  So I wanted to keep all rated files local and get rid of all the pictures that I didn’t necessarily want to delete, but wanted to store externally. I used these options:

• Set it to match "All" rules
• Rating is "Unrated"
• Date is not in the last 30 days (so I still have time to post-process things I’ve just shot"
• File status is online (so it’s not picking anything I’ve already relocated)
• iPhoto roll is empty (I just did this because I never went back and rated my old iPhoto library)

Now, before you plug in the external hard drive hit Command-A, or go to the Edit menu and hit "Select all"

Since we haven’t plugged in the external hard drive yet, any files we’ve already relocated there are still "offline" and won’t show up in the Smart Album.

Now just hit File > Relocate Masters, and pick a place to put them.  I store them in /Pictures on the drive, since there in my Pictures folder locally.

It’ll chug for a while, depending how many photos you’re moving.  Once it’s done, quit aperture, disconnect the drive, and enjoy tons more free space!

I’ve been using Aperture ever since I bought a DSLR about a year and a half ago. In terms of functionality, I can’t even imagine what post-processing would be like without it.

I can plug in a memory card from any one of dozens of different DSLR’s and Aperture knows exactly how to handle it.

I can save presets for any of the post-processing techniques I use, and apply them to any of the photos that need the same work done. (Note to Apple, being able to apply presets in batch to a set of images would be the best thing ever. If that functionality exists, and I just don’t know about it, someone please enlighten me).

With the Flickr plugin, I can publish my photos in just a few clicks. The built-in gallery publishing feature is also very intuitive and useful.

So I’m sold on the functionality, but there’s a downside. This program gives me more of the dreaded Spinning-beach-balls than I’ve ever seen. I have a 1G Macbook Pro 1.83 Core duo, with maxed out (2GB) RAM. Photoshop CS3 runs like a dream. So does everything else I throw at this machine. Unfortunately, if I open up Aperture and click "Import All" on a card with 50-400 images on it, I can kiss my system responsiveness goodbye for at least 10 minutes.

Granted, I shoot RAW, but I also shoot with a Nikon D2H, which is a mere 4MP, and filesize is about 5MB. If I’m having trouble, how are people using this program with D200’s, D2X’s, or D40X’s.& Not to mention what it’s going to be like when someone plugs in a Canon 1Ds Mk III (Canon’s new 21MP behemoth pro body).

Am I doing something wrong? Or is my barely-a-year-old top-of-the-line laptop already obsolete? If only I’d waited a month to get a Core-2 duo. Though not any faster, I could’ve ran 4GB of RAM.

In searching the web for "Speed up Aperture," I did find a couple tips. The most obvious was to reindex the database. I’ll give it a try, but I think this will really only speed up browsing photos. I just want to be able to start post-processing pictures as they’re being downloaded from the CF card. 

Any tips on speeding up Aperture would be greatly appreciated. I think it’s time Apple says "The functionality is there, lets start optimizing."