Aperture Library

[Bruce Whittington]

I've clung to Aperture since its support was discontinued, and finally cut the ties when I moved my desktop to Catalina. I deleted the Aperture app, since it would no longer function. Recently, in ACDSee, I noticed the Aperture library still appeared. If I looked in Finder, the library icon appeared, but no sub folders, so I assumed it was "gone". But in ACDSee, there were hundreds of images in there, some of them heavily processed TIFF files of several hundred megabytes. I have never used Aperture as a filing system, but, however I was using it, it had built a substantial horde of large image files in its library, most of them duplicated elsewhere in my own filing system. So I started laboriously inspecting each one and determining if it was a duplicate and could be deleted, or was needed ( a few were). In the end I deleted 50 gigabytes from the hard drive - enough to store about 1000 large RAW image files. I don't use Photos, but if I am not mistaken, it creates a library too, as do other popular photo apps (like Lightroom I think, though I do not use it). I have always preferred to use my own filing system, and open images in any of the several apps I use as needed. But if you are doing the same thing, check to see if you don't find numbers of duplicated image files stashed in some app's library.

 

[DaveWT]

I used to keep my original photos in my own folders and then import them into iPhoto (and later, Photos). This certainly created a duplication of my photos, but in the early days I did not trust the iPhotos app completely. I was aware I was duplicating, but willing to pay the price in storage room.
I pretty well have abandoned my own folders of photos now (except in a few rare cases where I have photos that I want to keep entirely separate from what is in Photos, like photos I take of my wife's quilts that she will want to use on her website or in creating patterns for sale etc.) I have never gone back and deleted any of the folders full of photos I stored away back then but as my storage fills up, that will be a task I will undertake someday probably.

 

[chas_m]

Photos, Lightroom, Aperture, Luminar, and any other photo app that creates a "catalog" or "library" all use basically the same technique: they store the photos in a (sometimes hidden) folder chronologically and then build a database of the metadata so as to arrange the "display" of those images in the order the user wants. The really important thing with these systems is DO NOT mess with the database unless you are just salvaging the images from a now-unused program.