I’m a big fan of Apple’s Aperture photo management software (quelle surprise, I know). It’s a professional-level software package that allows you to import, manage, organize, and edit digital photographs in their original RAW format (the highest quality, uncompressed format generated by digital SLRs). I do my photo work on my desktop computer, but often wish I had my photos available on my laptop. This would allow me to access the photos from anywhere, and would also make my MacBook a de facto mobile backup of my photo library.

After searching around, I’ve finally found a solution…and it’s free! After installing Aperture on both machines, you can use a built-in utility called rsync to keep the portable copy of your Aperture library up to date. While there are tools to manipulate rsync using a graphical interface, I choose to use the built-in Terminal application to directly work with rsync.

For this example, I’m assuming both machines are on the same network, though this need not be the case if you have your computer’s IP address and have it accessible over the internet. I’m also assuming that you’re using Aperture’s “managed library”, where the software stores all your photos in a single “package”.

From my MacBook, I enter the following at the command line:

rsync -avzE --delete username@desktop.local:/Users/username/Pictures/"Aperture\
Library.aplibrary"/ /Users/username/Pictures/"Aperture Library.aplibrary"/

Replace “username” with your username (it appears 3 times in the command line) and replace “desktop” with the name of your desktop machine.

I run this periodically to keep the portable version of my Aperture library up to date.