Recently Apple released a welcome major update to Aperture. This added a lot of new features and with that there came a file format change. Moving to this new format required a lot of processing to convert my library containing about 40,000 referenced images to the new format. This left my Aperture Library file a fragmented mess.

Coriolis Systems has a defragmentation product called iDefrag. It works well and will burn itself onto a bootable CD/DVD and which will allow your to really optimize the layout on the hard disk.

iDefrag allows for the definition of classes files which allow you defrag a specific sets of files. The classes file is defined in the documentation and given in a rough BNF grammar. They don’t provide any examples other than their builtin definitions called Default.classes and builtin.classes found within the application bundle: /Applications/iDefrag.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj. A Google search doesn’t return much of anything in the line of a howto to help create new ones.

To keep my Aperture library from fragmenting to badly I’ve created an Aperture.classes file which defines a set of files that files that Aperture 3 uses. This file lives within ~/Library/Application Support/iDefrag. There can be multiple Aperture Library file sets and even the default can be different for everyone so simply I stayed with just using the filenames found within Aperture.

class "Aperture" {
    match files where name = "AP.Minis"
    match files where name = "AP.Thumbnails"
    match files where name = "AP.Tinies"
    match files where name = "AP.FaceTiles"
    match files where name = "BigBlogs.apdb"
    match files where name = "Faces.db"
    match files where name = "Library.apdb"
    match files where name = "Historp.apdb"
    match files where name = "Properties.apdb"

    color "Crayons:Cantaloupe"
}

From within iDefrag I can now select this Aperture class set and which Algorithm to use and let iDefrag do it’s thing.

I hope this is helpful and keeps your Aperture library defragmented and nice and speedy.