So here's the deal. I shoot 100% digital. My workflow goes like this:

1. Shoot a bunch of photos
2. Delete the really bad ones
3. Pick 3 or so from the remaining
4. Edit in Photoshop
5. Distribute results

Obviously, I care a lot about my work, so I have a Netgear ReadyNAS that I back up to. It's expandable to 3TB+, so space there isn't much of a concern. Unfortunately, I'm reaching the limits of my 100Gb hard drive to hold all my data.

So here's what I'd really like to do: have a master photo repository housed on my NAS, then check out parts of it on to my Mac, work with them, then save them back to the repository on the NAS.

To that end, I've got 2 questions:

1. Can Aperture do anything like this?
2. Can Aperture's versioning system handle PSDs or other file types?

Sorry if this is confusing, I can clear it up if need be.

That's exactly the kind of workflow that Aperture (or LightRoom) are designed for speeding up.

Aperture doesn't really care what format the originals are in (RAW files, PSDs, JPEGs, TIFFs, PNGs, even PDFs), but layered PSDs will need to have been saved with 'maximise compatibility' turned on. You may also have issues if a lot of your images have alpha channels.

You can't store Aperture's actual Library on the NAS as it doesn't like living on non-HFS+ drives, but that doesn't stop you storing all the master files on the NAS and referencing them from within Aperture. Performance will be a bit lower than it would be if the files were stored on a local disk, but it should be useable.

Ian