Tech ShortsBetter than briefs or boxers, techshorts provides the latest talk about the cutting edge of technology.

It’s probably been obvious from previous posts that I use Apple’s Aperture photo management software for all my photo processing and management.
The size of my Aperture library on my laptop is 76.3GB. It is the largest folder on my harddrive. In fact, it takes up roughly half the harddrive space on my laptop.

The recent upgrade to Aperture to version 3 has an interesting requirement (and by interesting I mean completely and utterly brain dead). After installing the upgrade and running the upgrade it needs to update your Aperture library. To do that it requires somewhere between 40% to 100% of the original library size to be available in free disk space. (It’s not clear exactly how much you actually need free because it doesn’t tell you, and it seems to be different for different people)

For me, it means I need to have somewhere between 30.52 and 76.3GB of free disk space. Unfortunately, with the size of the operating system, there is no physical way that I can free up 76.3GB of disk space on my laptop. I currently have 39.29GB of disk space free on my laptop and that isn’t enough for Aperture 3.

When I try to update the library I first get a message that says:
Insufficient Disk Space
There is not enough free space on your Aperture Library Volume
(OK)
When I click the OK button I get a message that says:
Warning
Update failed.
(Quit)
And of course when I click the Quit button Aperture quits.

Now I happen to know that a majority of the 76.3GB of data in the Aperture library are the actual raw image files from my digital camera (.NEF’s in my case). So why do I need so much free disk space to update my library?

It’s clear this is a failure in software engineering design. It’s also a failure to test likely use cases, but that could be another whole post.

This is one of my rules of software engineering:
Don’t require more resources to do a job then the average person would expect would be required to do that job.

Would the average person think that you would need more than 30GB of disk space free to upgrade to the latest version of a program after they have already installed the new executable? Clearly, they would not.

So how did this happen? Maybe the library has complex interdependencies in it’s data structure. Maybe someone made the decision to create a new library using the original as a source and then deleting the original when finished to ease dealing with the complexity. Unfortunately, this design flaw means that the customers who use the product the most are also the ones who are most likely to encounter a problem. Furthermore, duplicating any of the image files is completely unnecessary, because they aren’t changing in the update process.

Is this what is happening? I don’t know, although it seems possible based on what people are posting on Apple’s support forum.

What I do know is that I have 40GB of free disk space and Aperture 3 won’t run because it says I don’t have enough disk space free. That’s a FAIL any way you look at it.

Read my next post for my fix.