I have a question about moving/relocating vaults. I looked around your site, but haven't been able to find anything. I ran out of space on my external, where I store my vault just before xmas. So yesterday I bought a new external. It's only storing items I've put in my library since my last update on the old vault. I want to know how can I create a fresh new vault and store EVERYTHING in it on my new external? Do I need to remove my old vault from aperture? I appreciate any help.

There are two ways to move a vault: move it yourself and tell Aperture where it has moved to, or abandon the old vault and create a new one on the new drive. The former is more useful if you have moved a Firewire disk from one server to another and have not had to copy anything; the latter if you are moving to a new drive and have to copy the data anyway.

Here is an example of moving a vault. Here is my current vault:

I want to move it to a different volume. First I notice that it is not synced, so I click on the arrows button to do a sync:

And then I copy the vault to its new destination by using the Finder.

I have make the current vault go offline before Aperture will allow me to give a new location for it. If it were on an external drive I could do this easily: just unmount the drive and Aperture would note that. In my case it's on my internal hard drive, so I must move or rename it. I can't make any changes to it straight away because it is locked:

I unlock the file in the Finder by deselecting the Locked checkbox in the Finder's Get Info window (command I):

Now I move the file to a different place on my hard drive so that Aperture will not find it, then quit and relaunch Aperture. Now Aperture sees it as disconnected:

I am ready to tell Aperture where the vault has moved to. I select the vault in Aperture's vault pane, and from the cog menu bottom right I select Update Vault Path...

I navigate to the new location to tell Aperture where it is and can now use the vault as normal.

To delete the old vault, since the lock was removed, I just drag it to the trash and empty the trash. If I had moved to another hard drive then I would format the old drive immediately to make sure that it was impossible to get the vault on it confused with my new one.

Tags: Aperture, Q&A, Vaults, Moving

If I put a keyword in the wrong place in the keyword hierarchy, then I can just drag it to where it should be. If I want the keyword to be at the top level, then I just drag it past the end of the list and drop it there. So far so good.

Here I have a keyword Oops that should not be under Animals. I want it at the top level, so I just drag it.


But I can't do that if I want it at the top level and the HUD is full of keywords because there is no end of list to drag it past.

To solve this problem, I type the keyword (or a part of it) into the search box to shorten the list. Now I can drag the keyword past the end of the list and get it to the top level again. Here is the same list in a much smaller HUD, but it is filtered by the search word and the move works:


Clicking the little X on the right of the search box gets the complete list back.

Tags: Keywords, Aperture, Moving