I’ve begin the horrid task of relocating all of my master images from Aperture to a ZFS CIFS share. It’s slow and painful, but it needs to happen, as it’s one of the steps in the chain to make my photo management a little more sane. Right now, my Aperture library has grown to 550 GB. This is with all of the master images, plus all edits, databases of metadata, tags, and multiple revisions of files. It’s impossible to backup, and it’s chewing up far too much disk space when viewed as a monolithic block.

By relocating the master files to a network share, they become easier to access and therefore easier to backup. The image files will be separated from the Aperture data, making each easier to maintain and manage. I can also use other image manipulation programs on the files – possibly even setting up a photo sharing web application, hosted from the file server itself. The other thing this will allow to me to is to evaluate Adobe Lightroom. I love Aperture, and it’s not missing any features per se, but it’s been a long time since it’s been upgraded. Not nearly as bad as the 10 years that Hypercard sat as an inactive product on Apple’s website, but still. I want to know that I have options. This won’t preserve my edits, but at least I’ll be able to get at the files themselves.

The other issue: ZFS is getting deduplication, soon. Hopefully this year. Which means by moving the image files to a ZFS share, I can take advantage of block level deduplication for my image files. This may not get me terribly much with different files, but I know I have a lot of copies of the same images. It would be excruciating to try to get rid of duplicates by hand. ZFS will make this a whole lot less bad.