The Power of Merging Libraries

Aperture 3 has added a whole host of functions for the control of Libraries. It’s possible to export anything as a Library and to import or merge libraries. Merging is one of the more powerful features as it allows Libraries with similar contents to be combined, preserving changes.

Let’s say for example that a photographer has a Library on their work desktop and their travel laptop, and both of them contain the same content when the photographer goes on the road. While on location the photographer imports into the Library as normal. With Aperture 2, when returning back to the office it would be necessary to export each Project from the location shoot and then import each of those into the desktop Aperture Library. This would take a lot of time and disk space as the images exported from the original Project would live in the laptop Library and wherever they were exported to, before they were imported into the desktop Library. In essence there would be three copies of each file.

The alternate approach would be to overwrite the desktop Library with the laptop on, but that has its own issues.

By being able to merge Libraries, it’s now possible in this same situation for the photographer to shoot in the field on their laptop and simply tell Aperture to merge the two Libraries, which will have the effect of only importing files that have change. (These files can be the new images, or any shots from the original Library that were edited on the laptop.)

Here’s how to do that.