I’ve been very happy using Apple’s Aperture as my image repository. I have a library of 178 GB on a 500 GB disk. I have a slower, but size matched 500 GB Vault disk. There are some other data archives taking up room on the disks, but these are designated for images and should provide capacity through next year.
I’m on my third Time Machine drive for backing up everything else. I love the idea, but it really does use up disk space at a frightening pace. My third 500 GB drive won’t hold more that a week’s worth of backup, so today I’ve added a 1TB drive for Time Machine. It’s odd to me that Time Machine lets you switch disks easily, but doesn’t move the archive to the new disk. So I’m faced with wiping the old archive or putting the drive aside. Since the archive only goes back a week, I’ll probably just wipe it and depend on the new 1TB drive.
Also added to the arsenal today is a firewire Compact Flash reader for getting D300 images off the cards more quickly. Connecting the camera by cable is slow and uses up the batteries. A valuable little gadget.
The big remaining issue is storing and processing my D300 RAW files. Aperture can’t read them, so I’ve been keeping them out of Aperture. I’m using Capture NX exclusively for conversion and like the results so much that I think it will become a permanent part of the workflow.
At this point I expect Apple to provide support pretty soon, so I’ll live without the Aperture support. Once I can use Aperture for asset management again, I’ll probably go back to exporting the RAWs of high rated images to a folder for RAW conversion by Capture NX. After saving as a TIFF with the same file name, I can drag the images back into the Aperture project for asset management. I’m left with the Capture NX NEF files that have the instructions for the image alterations embedded in them. They don’t render in Aperture and the manupulations don’t survive being brought in and re-exported from Aperture, leaving me with a folder of altered NEFs outside of Aperture.