One of the more dramatic shifts we’ve had to deal with in recent years is working with less storage in laptops. Having 500 GB or 1 TB in a portable computer was no big deal, giving us plenty of breathing room. But the switch to SSDs (solid state drives) changed that metric. An SSD is significantly faster and enables companies to make thinner, lighter designs such as the MacBook Air. (An SSD can also extend the life of an older computer, as I describe in this TidBITS article about how I added one to my MacBook Pro.) The tradeoff is that SSDs are still more expensive than spinning-platter hard disks, so we’ve had to figure out how to make do with a smaller internal playground.
Photographer and all-around Mac expert Derrick Story writes on his blog today about how he handles the 256 GB limitation of his 2012 Retina MacBook Pro when dealing with the digital photos he captures. The secret: he takes advantage of Aperture’s ability to reference images stored on different volumes.
That’s a big reason why I recommend people switch to something like Lightroom (my preference) or Aperture in my book Take Control of Your Digital Photos on a Mac; iPhoto just can’t handle it. (My book also includes a process for migrating from iPhoto to Lightroom, which isn’t a trivial task thanks to Apple’s limitations in iPhoto.)
Jeff Carlson | Never Enough Coffee Creations 