Aperture and laptops

For those of you digital photography enthusiasts who use Aperture, here's a little bit of info on how I deal with going out of town with my laptop, but wanting to do the "real work" on my desktop when I get home. It turns out that if you are careful, you can save yourself a lot of time and effort. I have a new idea that I haven't tried yet, that might have some cute results for working on the home network, but that is a more involved test that I'll do later.

Right now, what I do is import the photo files into my Photos directory manually (usually a subdirectory), and then import those files by reference (don't copy the data) into a new Aperture Project on the laptop. This way, I can play around with them and sort them prior to getting back to my main computer.

When I return home, I then use the Export... command to export the Project created above, taking care not to let it consolidate the data into the project file. I then import this file over AppleShare by mounting the laptop disk on the desktop machine. This imports the important data and leaves the files on the laptop, where they are still available.

Once I'm happy with that, I use the Consolidate command to consolidate the photos into the vault on my desktop machine, taking care to copy, not move, the data. This way, the project on my laptop is still completely functional until I decide to delete the data.

Once I'm satisfied that everything is moved over, I then delete the sub-folder in the Photos directory and get my disk space back on the laptop.