Restoring an Aperture vault

I have an Aperture vault that I want to restore. The Macbook I have doesn't have enough storage space to restore the vault on its hard drive, so I tried to set the library destination to an external hard drive to no avail. The error message says it was unable to create an .aplibrary file.

Is there a way to retrieve individual images from the vault instead of restoring the entire thing to bypass the space issue? or another way to restore the vault?