A question I get over and over again has to do with managing referenced masters. A really typical scenario is this: “I have a whole bunch of masters on a disk, that belong to a variety of projects, which I would like to move to a different disk. How do I move these to my new drive without having to know which projects they are connected to?”

In other words, it’s really easy to open Aperture, find a project full of images and use Relocate Masters to move the master files to a new location, but what if we are talking about images from any number of projects.

One of the beautiful things about Referenced Masters is that you can keep your files anywhere you want, but this can cause confusion, unless you “manage your referenced files.”

So let’s try and figure out how to solve our little problem. The first thing I would do is get a view in my Aperture browser of all my images. This is easy enough, just click “All Images” under the Library drop-down in the Projects tab. Once all of your images start showing up as thumbnails (it helps to have Quick Preview turned on for this) you will notice at the bottom that it says “1 selected - xx images displayed.” So now we need to select the entire set by hitting command-A.

Once you have all of the images selected go to the file menu and select Manage Referenced Files. This will bring up that familiar dialog box you may have used in the past to reconnect lost references to their masters, but here we are going to use it for a different purpose.

On the top left you will see a list of your volumes. Select the volume of the disk containing the images you want to move, and you will see a list of all the images on that disk appear. If you want to move them all click the top image and then shift-click the bottom image on the list.

Once you have selected all the images you wish to move from that volume hit the “Update Selection In Browser” button. This will change the selection in your browser from all files in your library to just the ones you wish to relocate. You can now close the Manage Referenced Files dialog and use either the Relocate Masters function to move them to a new drive, or the Consolidate Masters button to bring them back into your Aperture library as Managed files.