Saturday, July 3, 2010 at 2:57 AM | User Tip by Morten Scheel Deleting Leftovers After Round-Tripping
When you decide to edit an image in your external editor, Aperture creates a copy of that image in your library and sends that to your editor. The format of this file is determined by the Export pane in Preferences (I recommend TIFF 16-bit to avoid loss of data). The problem is that these files are huge (100+ megabytes) and you have to delete them manually in most cases when you’re done with them.
An example: You pull three images into Photoshop to make a Photomerge or generate an HDR. Aperture creates three TIFF files and sends those to Photoshop. Now your Aperture library has three RAWs of about 20 MB each AND three TIFFs of about 100 MB each.
Your result in Photoshop can’t be saved directly back to Aperture because the panorama or HDR you created is a new composite image that doesn’t exist in Aperture. So you save it somewhere and import your final image to Aperture.
But the three huge TIFFs are still there, and unless you delete them manually, you’ll run out of disk space before you know what hit you.
Fortunately it’s relatively easy to find those redundant files. Select the project they’re in (or select the whole library) and click the “Filter” button next to the search field. Now click “Add rule” and select “Image type”. Set up the rule to search for image type “Externally Edited” only.
IMPORTANT! Everything that has been through your external editor or one of your plug-ins will show up and you obviously don’t want to delete them all. But it should be easy enough to spot the images you want to get rid of.
Remember to empty your trash folders (both Aperture’s and the System’s) once in a while to reclaim the disk space.
Hope this helps.
Morten
Reader Comments (2)
What is your reason for exporting in tif rather than psd?
Nice tip. I tend to delete the extra files ASAP but I can see where this could be very handy if you are on a time crunch and don't want to mess with it right away.