Operation Manual

When you back up your masters to your vaults on external drives, those actions are tracked
by the Aperture library as well. For more information about backing up your library, see
Backing Up Your Images.
What Are Managed Images and Referenced Images?
Aperture lets you choose how you organize your photos on disk. You can store your
photos in the Aperture library, or you can import images by simply linking to the image
files in their current locations, without placing them in the library.
Images whose masters are stored in the Aperture library are called managed images.
Managed images are always accessible, and are easily backed up to vaults, to name just
two benefits.
Imported images whose masters haven’t been placed in the library are called referenced
images. Using referenced images in your Aperture system provides a number of substantial
benefits to your photography workflow. For example, you can incorporate your existing
portfolio of images into Aperture without changing the current location of the files.
Importing images by reference does not result in a duplication of your image files in the
Aperture library, thus saving hard disk space. You can also connect and disconnect hard
disks holding your referenced images’ masters as you need them. This allows you to keep
masters for less-used images offline or to make specific types of images available for
editing or adjustments as needed. Using referenced images in your Aperture system lets
you build a flexible image management system customized to your work style.
You specify whether an image will be a managed image or a referenced image when you
import it. When importing images, you can:
• Specify that masters be stored in the Aperture library
• Import images as referenced images, so that their masters remain in their current
locations
• Move or copy image files to a new location. For example, you might decide to have a
certain group of referenced image files, such as photos from 2008, placed in one hard
disk location, and another group, such as photos from 2009, placed in a different hard
disk location.
You can work with referenced images—creating versions, making adjustments, cropping,
and adding metadata—just as you can with managed images. Versions that you create
from a referenced image are stored in the library. In order for you to make adjustments
to a version from a referenced image, the referenced image’s master must be available
on your hard disk or other storage device. For example, if you delete a referenced image’s
master in the Finder, Aperture no longer has access to the master and so no longer allows
you to change your versions or create new ones.
119Chapter 3 Working with the Aperture Library