First, quickly, I love your site, and thank you for the useful information you have on it. Quick question: I have an aperture library with referenced masters. My library is approx. 13000 images, totaling approx 25GB. I do not automatically create previews for the images, in fact I periodically select all images and choose to delete previews. I only have previews for about 200 images that I sync to my iPhone. I use keywords, but not overwhelmingly; I do have Blue and Gray folder organizational structure within Aperture. I have very few smart albums/lightables/etc. Mostly I have 7-8 Blue (top level folders) with each shoot being a separate project under one of the Blue folders. So the question is, why is my ApertureLibrary.aplibrary file over 7GB in size? Thank you in advance for your help.

For 13,000 images, that works out to 540k each, about right in my estimation. The space is used mainly by the thumbnails that Aperture stores for each version.

Here I have a small project with 13 images, all referenced. None of them have previews. To look inside, I open my library with control-click and select Show Package Contents, then navigate down to the project and open that the same way:

Pretty much everything is small except for the AP.Minis and AP.Thumbnails files. The former holds 256 pixel thumbnails at 16 bits per pixel, 128K per image. The latter holds 1024 pixel JPEGs, about 415k each. The whole project is 7.3MB, so those two thumbnail files account for about 95% of the space used. This also shows why vaults are smaller than libraries: they omit the thumbnails.

Creating high resolution previews for these images would add somewhere between 2MB and 5MB per image, depending on the size and fidelity of the JPEGs generated. That would boost the project size by between 26MB and 65MB, a significant increase over the current 7.3MB.

The library has some overhead beyond the projects it contains. By opening the library with control click and Show Package Contents I can see the files at the top level:

The biggest non-project item is the database file at 2.2MB Not particularly significant in this 7GB library.

To a very rough approximation the library size is given by:

(number of managed masters * master size) + (number of versions * 500k) + (number of previews * 3MB)

Tags: Aperture, Q&A, Size, Library, Thumbnails, Previews

Planet Earth is pretty big. Or maybe not once you start comparing it to the other planets or the sun, or other suns. That link is very slow. Give it a minute or so.

Tags: Fun, Size, Planets, Interesting Stuff