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APERTURE 3 ORGANIZATION A guide to Apple Aperture’s extensive organizational features. ROBERT W BOYER North East Md Usa 213.674.4450 R B D E S I G N Photography | Design | Consulting www.rwboyer.com

Aperture 3 Organization

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APERTURE 3 ORGANIZATIONA guide to Apple Aperture’s extensive organizat ional features .

ROBERT W BOYERNorth East Md Usa

213.674.4450

R B D E S I G NPhotography | Design | Consult ing

w w w. r w b o y e r. c o m

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IntroductionAperture workflow and organization

Two of Aperture’s greatest strengths are it’s flexibility and organizational features. The flexibility that I am praising is also a fairly huge obstacle to new users. Aperture does not force you into a set workflow, you can pretty much do anything that Aperture does at any time, anywhere in the application. Want to make some color adjustments while your laying out a book? Go ahead. Want to add a keyword while you are looking at the images in a web gallery? No problem. Want to create a black and white version of an image in a slide show album? So on and so on. This kind of flexibility extends to Apertures organizational tools as well. Let’s use an arbitrary definition of Aperture’s organiza-tional features as things that you can create that have no other purpose but to categorize or group related images or other things together. Using this definition those features would be Projects, folders, blue albums (Aperture refers to them as just “Albums”), and purple albums (Aperture refers to these as “Smart Albums”). There is one other feature that we will throw in there that is related to organization, that feature is stacks. All of these features can be used in any way in almost any combination with each other that you choose. There is no “set” way to do things, this makes Aperture amazingly powerful but at the same time somewhat confusing to those just starting out.

There are a few other things that I will cover that are “built-in” to Aperture that fall under image organization as well. By “built-in” I mean that there is no need to create them - they are there to be used any time you choose to do so. Things like various sorting and filtering functions, as well as those new to Aperture 3 - Faces and Places. I will not specifically cover slide shows, books, light tables, web albums, or the like. Those latter features for the most part work just like albums in terms of organization, albums with the twist that they provide functions that portray your images in a different way than just on the screen in front of you. Those features deserve their own separate discus-sion.

This document will focus on how these organizational features work and some examples on how you can use them to manage your images. Please don’t take the way that I happen to use the organizational tools as the only way to do it. The great thing about Aperture is that once you understand how the tools work, you can use them in the most effec-tive manner for you. You also can change your mind and organize things differently down the road with not a whole lot of work. It’s perfectly alright to have a couple different ways of organizing your images in the same library. None of us are single dimensional, we all make images for a lot of different reasons on different days, maybe even the same day. I travel, I have a family, I do commercial projects, fashion, portraits, personal art projects. I choose to organize them in vastly different ways. The way I choose to organize my projects and images for a commercial fashion job is not even close to the way I organize my family holiday event projects. Keeping this in mind I hope to give you a foundation that you can use to get the most out of Aperture’s incredible organizational tools.

Getting started

Before delving into projects, folders, etc. there are a few key concepts that absolutely must be understood or you risk becoming hopelessly and permanently confused. The concepts I am talking about are masters, versions, and to a lesser degree stacks. I believe a lot of confusion stems from a combination of these concepts not being explained very well in the Aperture documentation, the term master and version being used somewhat ambiguously in different parts of the documentation, and the fact that image stacks contain a combination of both. At the risk of a bunch of redundant information I am going to rehash these concepts, hopefully in a different way, because they are critical to really understanding Aperture’s organization.

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Here goes. Masters live in projects. Masters can only live in one and only one project at a time. This has been said about a million times, the reason for that is it’s really important. What hasn't been said as many times but is sort of what makes this fact really important is that versions of that master image file always live with the associated masters although you may see a version in many many different places. In fact you may see those versions in many different projects, even in projects that those versions do not live in. It may be helpful if you think of it this way. You never actually see a master image, you can see what a master looks like but you are always looking at a version. If we take the simplest case, of one master image file imported into one project what you are looking at is the one and only ver-sion. A lot of people refer to this one and only one version as “the master”. This really is not the case. That one lonely image in the project that you just important is actually just a version - there is nothing really special about it. It is not “the master” being somehow special. If you duplicate that version using the image menu, context menu, or option+V you will see two images. Both of them are versions and equal in every single way except the version name. The first one is not somehow special in any way. Those two version are associated with the same master image that you im-ported into Aperture. The question “how do I tell which one is the master” comes up a lot with new Aperture users. The real answer is neither of them - they are two versions associated with the same version. Prove it to yourself. Click on the first one and use command+delete to get rid of it. That version goes away but nothing happens to the master image file. The second version is still there. The only thing special is when there is one and only one version that is associated with a particular master file. In this case if you delete that last version the master file will also be deleted by default Aperture will give you a warning if this is the case. Let’s look at a couple of illustrations to help make sense out of this.

Here we have a project with exactly one master and one version, simple enough. In the project inspector panel to the left the project called “Master and Version” contains two albums they are both empty (more on albums later). The one image that you see is the only version in the project. Watch what happens when we duplicate the version (menu, con-

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text menu, or option-v). We now have a stack with two versions. I’ll do it again so that we have a total of three versions in the stack so that I can illustrate the difference between where a version lives and where you can see a version. For the pur-poses of this demonstration let’s unstack them. by selecting them all and using the menu command under stacks. I am going to drag the second one to Album #1 and the third ver-sion to Album #2.. You may want to try this in your library by creating a new empty project and jamming just any old image

in there. By dragging the versions into the albums I did not copy anything, no new versions were created there are still a total of three versions in the project. The only thing I did by dragging them to the albums was allow you to see a particular version in a specific album.

In Album #1 I am going to bring up the adjustment HUD and change it to black and white. In album #2 I’ll change the blues to purple. If I click back on the project box you will see the changes to that version. In fact you can create as many albums as you would like, drag a version into all those albums but you are looking at the exact same version in every single al-bum. Anything that you do to that version no matter where you do it can be seen wherever that version shows up. Key-

words, metadata, adjustments all of it.

In yet more words a version can show up in 20 places, that does not mean there are 20 versions. If you hit the delete key in an album the version that is highlighted will not show up in that album any more. The version does not get deleted, it still lives in the project and still shows up everywhere else to. Conversely if you delete a version (using the context menu, the file menu, or the command-delete key), no matter where you do it, the version actually goes away everywhere. If you create a new version no matter where you create it, the new version lives in the project with all of the rest of the ver-

sions. For ex-ample, if I cre-ate a duplicate version in Al-bum #1. Click-ing on the “Master and Version” pro-

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ject shows that the new version was created in the project, the only reason that you can see it in Album #1 is that you created it there. If I highlight the new version in Album #1 and hit the delete key you can’t see it in Album #1 any more but it still ex-ists in the project. I know this was a lot of tedious blah blah blah about versions but it is absolutely essential to understand that the only place versions live and exist is inside of a project, in fact one project only, the project where the master lives. Versions don’t live in albums, web galleries, books, light tables, etc. When you put versions into other things you are not mak-ing copies you are just causing them to show up in those other things. When you remove versions from those other places they are not being deleted, you just cannot see them in that place any more. Again any changes that you make no matter where you make them happens to that version you can see those changes everywhere that version shows up. Not grasping this concept is where most people go off the rails in understanding the rest of Aperture’s tools for organizing their library of images.

One other thing to mention, I unstacked the versions at the beginning of this discussion for illustration only. This is usually a really bad idea. We will be discussing stacks shortly. The relationship between stacks and albums is another important concept when mastering Aperture.

Some practical notes on masters and versions

A couple of notes on masters and versions based on a lot of frequently asked questions that I have received from people learning Aperture.

• If you drag any version out of one project and drop it on an-other project Aperture moves the master and all of the ver-sions associated with that master into the target project. If you do this by accident don’t panic undo works fine, everything in the project stays the same anyway, you can drag them back the same way. If you have a project with a bunch of albums, etc. but see no images when you click on the project icon you either did this by accident or you may have unwanted search criteria in the browser search box.

• You can copy masters and all associated versions by Option + dragging any version to another project. Although this works fine, make sure you have a very good reason to do this. Unlike other things in Aperture doing this actu-ally doubles the storage use. There is usually a better more efficient alternative for almost everything you might want to accomplish. If what you are trying to do is have images from one project available in another that is really easy and usually better dealt with by creating an album in the target project and dragging images into it from any other project that you want to. This leaves masters/versions in the original project and allows you to see and use them in the target project at almost no storage cost. You can even create smart albums in one project, drag them to another and they retain the original context of where they were created.

• The delete key is pretty safe. It does not get rid of versions or the master. If you are clicked on a project it does nothing but boing at you. If you are looking at an album, book, or any other album type thing. it removes the ver-sion from that view but does not delete the version or master from the project. Command-delete actually removes/deletes the version from the project and everywhere else it might show up. If the version that you command-delete

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Drop targets are important. When I am talking about dragging images into a project you must specifically use the actual yellow project box as the drop target. If you use any other drop target inside of a project like an album, the images are not moved or copied, they are merely added to that album.

Note regarding the delete key: By itself the delete key just removes a version from the current album type object. Command-delete actually removes a version from the library so it will not show up anywhere any more. If it happens to be the last version the master will go along with it.

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is the only version associated with a master image file the master is deleted from the project/library as well. When this happens you are prompted. Be very careful whey you command-delete, it can get rid of entire projects if the project is highlighted in the inspector.

• If you send a version to and external editor (using edit with) a new master will be created in either PSD or Tiff for-mat as selected in the export preferences. So “versions” edited with external editors behave a little differently than versions that are created from the original master or duplicated. Specifically they are not really versions of that original master image file anymore, they have a new and different master image.

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ProjectsProject basics

As we just discussed all masters and every version of a master live in a project, in fact only one project. Pretty much everything else that Aperture can create can also live in a project. I say “can live in a project” because they don’t have to. Albums, smart albums, folders, light tables, books, etc can actually live anywhere and contain any images. The only caveat to that is that folders behave a little differently depending on where they live. In previous versions of Aperture folders used to be two different colors depending on where they lived indicating what kind of function they served. I guess Apple thought that was too confusing so now all folders are blue no matter if they are inside a project or outside a project. Both types of folders are topics discussed later. For now the things that can live in projects are: Albums, Smart albums, Light tables, Books, Web journals, Web pages, and Smart web pages. In fact you can create as many of those things that you need or want inside of project. The really cool thing is they are almost free in terms of storage cost.

The really nice thing about projects is they can be exported and im-ported as a whole comprehensive set of things. When they are ex-ported in Aperture 3, they function as a standalone library that. We’ll look at this more in discussing workflows involving multiple com-puters. Projects are the basic unit of organizing and packaging all of the images or other things that you need to complete a....ta da project.

One thing that is not discussed a whole lot regarding projects is that projects can contain books, light tables, albums, etc. and contain no master images or versions at all. I use this a lot to put together pro-jects that I actually shot for a different purpose. Take a look at the “Workshop” project on the right. It has a light table called “Layout”, an album called “Prints”, and a book called “Workshop Book”. I cre-ated an empty project then created and empty light table, album, and book inside it. I drug selected images out of the “Rated” smart album into the new book, layout, etc that are in the Workshop project. The “Rated” album is collecting rated images that live in all of the projects within the folder “Glamour”. I am pretty much using the “Workshop” project as a place to organ-ize some things to create a promotional book design for my lighting workshops. That project does not actually con-tain any master image files or versions, those “live” in other projects. The only thing that “lives” in this project are the light table, prints album, and book design. The nice thing is that I can logically organize my work without making copies of images all over the place and having to worry about propagating minor tweaks to any image version eve-rywhere it is used.

Thoughts on project organization

As I mentioned earlier most of us are making images of some fairly diverse subject matter. If you are only making a couple images a month of the family or maybe a few on special occasions you will probably be fine just creating a project structure in chronological order and maybe adding a couple of keywords here and there. If you’re somebody like me that gets paid to make images or just loves to take pictures or both, you may want to consider creating a pro-ject structure based on the organizational needs of the work that you do. The great thing is you don’t have to lock yourself into one particular way of doing it. I’ll give you a couple of examples.

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I do a lot of beauty and fashion work in the studio and on location. I probably shoot somewhere between 1000 and 2000 images for a session lasting about a day. I usually have a specific purpose, product, and client that I shoot for in each of these sessions. One session, one or two days, one client, one location, seems to fit nicely into one project. So I tend to create one project and load all of the images for that client, for that product into that one project.

I do portrait work too. I may have four portrait clients in a day. Simple I use four projects. One project for each client. For family pictures I usually just make a project for the event, sometimes it’s based on a date like “Christmas 2007” or “Easter 2008” or “Beach 2006” That seems to work well for my family pictures, your milage may vary. I love to travel, some-times I travel with my family and I shoot personal pictures as well as more traditional travel photography. I usually create one or more projects for the trip travel photography and one for the family pictures that I happen to take during the trip. I try to do some journalistic work as well. For me one story equals one project. If you are a big time photojournalist covering an epic story about illegal immigration from china that spans multiple continents your needs may better served by creating projects based on place or maybe you are following the story of six different individuals and you want to create one project for each. Both would work, which one would work better is totally up to you and your needs.

The point is to create projects that make sense for what you are doing today. If your needs change in the future change the way that you create projects. I started a couple of documentary art projects and have one Aperture project

that corresponds to each. These projects are ongoing now for more than a year. Every time I shoot images for them I load them into the correspond-ing project. You do not have to come up with one formula that fits every-thing that you may ever do, that is not the point of Aperture. Aperture is designed to customize it to the needs you have right now and change it when your needs change. If you are super ADHD, or OCD, or whatever and can’t stop over-thinking things don’t worry, if you want to go back and redo your projects and move images to different project structures down the road it is not a total disaster, 99% of the real work you did will still be completely reusable. I personally would never do that because Ap-erture provides so many other ways to organize, breakdown, and get at your images there far better uses of my time.

One general piece of guidance that I can give you is keep your projects reasonable in size. By that I mean a few thousand images maximum. If you are a prolific shooter and shoot 10,000 images a week don’t work on a month long assignment loading them into one Aperture project along the way. This might be practical down the road but as of now it will cause you

some serious pain in a number of ways, performance being one way and the other is the next topic I will discuss.

Using multiple computers

If you are like me you probably have a desktop for heads down work and a laptop for travel. Without going into a bunch of stuff that you can do with referenced images and just sticking to managed libraries there are some simple C o p y r i g h t © 2 0 0 9 R o b e r t W B o y e r! A p e r t u r e 3 O r g a n i z a t i o n

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recipes to do work on your laptop without lugging along your entire library of images. For illustration I am going to stick to just working on a couple of active projects on your laptop. I’ll talk about how to carry an updated portfolio around on your laptop a little further on.

Let’s start on the desktop or your main Aperture library. Say you are going on a trip to shoot a story or a layout or whatever but you also have two projects that you would like to work on that you have already shot that are on your desktop computer. Really simple, as long as you have kept your projects reasonably compact, select those projects in the project inspector. Use “file->export->project(s)…” as new library.. Move the resulting new library to your laptop and you can either use that standalone library or you can merge it into another library on your laptop using “file->import->library/project…”. So now while you are on your 22 hour flight you can get that key-wording done or lay-out the book or images adjustments, etc. When you arrive and shoot the job or do your vacation you can import your new images into new projects on your laptop and do whatever work on them you want. Back at home move any up-dated libraries to your desktop computer, then use “file->import->library/project…” to merge the new and updated projects into your main desktop library. Aperture 3 will now give you the option of importing any projects as new projects or merging them. If you choose to import them as new projects they will be imported as separate projects no matter if they already exist or not. If you choose to merge the projects Aperture will update existing projects with anything that has changed and create new projects for projects that do not already exist.

There is a lot of new functionality in Aperture 3 related to project/library merging and how related master image files are handled in that process. Those details are outside the scope of this eBook that focuses on logical organization as opposed to physical file management. If your needs are beyond a managed library my Aperture 3 File Management eBook may be beneficial.

Albums

It was a toss up of whether I should discuss albums or stacks first because there is a lot of functionality and power when the two are combined, so I split the difference and will discus albums then stacks and then smart albums. I use the heck out of albums. Albums are practically free in terms of storage space and are so useful in so many different ways. They are part and parcel to my everyday workflow. I create albums constantly to track just about everything. Images I have post-processed, images I export to different places for display on the web, im-ages that are burned to a DVD for a client, all these things de-serve their own album. I could almost say that if I ever select a subset of images ffor any reason that I create an album out of that selectioint. Even if I only use it one more time, ever, it saves time. For instance if I select a bunch of images to add a keyword to all of them I usually just go ahead and use the new new album from selection function. Albums can also serve as a record of what I have done - like what images I exported to upload to an online portfolio or submit to a client. It is a whole lot better than keeping folders all over the place on your computer with copies of images at various resolutions and image formats. If I ever need that group of images again it is already there.

Take a look at the albums in the “Ghost Ships” project at the right. While I was keywording images in the project I selected the images that I wanted to add a specific keyword to and created an album with “new album from selec-tion”. Now I know you may be thinking that I could always just search on a particular keyword and get the same group to popup. You are right I could but since albums are pretty much free I can just click the album and get that

If you spend the time to create a custom sort order within an album and need to use it again for some-thing else that may require new versions don’t wast time completely resorting the images. Use duplicate album instead of “new from selection”. This will re-tain your custom sort order.

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group back immediately. In a month or two I might even forget the keyword that I added to just that group without going and looking for it. Albums are useful in other ways as well.

Now let’s take a look at the albums to the left. These albums do not exist inside of any project at all. Ignore the folders for now, we’ll get to those later. I use these albums to hold images of specific models who’s images actually live in multiple projects.

Examples of what you can do with this functionality are:

• Create an empty album anywhere, inside a completely different project if you would like and drag images from any other project that you want into that album, the images do not move anywhere, they just show up in the al-bum. This one tiny little piece of functionality allows you to group images together from as many different projects as you would like.

• Drag an album that already has images in it from one project to another. Again no image versions or masters are moved or copied anywhere but now those images are available inside the other project.

• Duplicate an album and drag it anywhere you want to any project or even outside of any project. Again they are almost free in terms of storage and performance. You can delete images from your duplicated albums or add im-ages to them with reckless abandon and nothing else will be effected.

• Bottom line, you can mix and match images from anywhere in your library in any way you like within any album. Being able to do this answers one of the biggest questions and resolves a huge source of anxiety for many new Ap-erture users when trying to decide what images go into what project. Remember a few pages ago when I told you not to worry about it. This is a big reason why you don’t have to worry too much.

Another really cool thing that you can do with albums is order the images in any arbitrary way that you want. Try it yourself. Make an album out of any selection of images, hit the v key until you are in the browser view and drag the order of the images around in any sequence. I use this feature all the time to throw an Aperture slide show together. I almost never use date or other pre-baked order in the sort drop down menu. Whatever order that you end up with sticks with that album until you reorganize it. If you accidentally resort it by using the drop down menu just use the menu to select “custom” and you are right back to the way you ordered your images. This functionality works with almost any Aperture feature including within a plain old browser view of a project as well but if you are going to sort images a specific way why not use an album to keep track of that sorting work and why you did it. Need a different ordering? Duplicate the album and sort away. Want to try your slide shows a couple of different orders. Keep them all, get rid of the ones you don’t like. Custom image sequences in slide shows are extremely important . Slide

If you spend the time to create a custom sort order within an album and need to use it again for some-thing else that may require new versions don’t wast time completely resorting the images. Use duplicate album instead of “new from selection”. This will re-tain your custom sort order.

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shows that put multiple images up on the screen at the same time sort orders are critical. Some images just look bad next to each other on the same screen.

Custom image sequences are not just for slide shows, use your imagination. If you don’t have an imagination, here is another example of how I happen to use albums and custom sorting of images. There are a million different ways that I need to export my images depending on what I am doing, what services I’m using, what the client needs. etc. Albums are extremely useful for grouping these export sets together but there’s more. Half of

the time I export images the set that I am exporting needs to have a specific order and a specific numerical sequence. Albums with custom image orders and export presets do the heavy lifting for you and can be reused over and over again.

Albums become even more useful when combined with stacks and some features of stacking that are specific to al-bums. Before we move on to stacks there is one more note regarding albums that you should know if you are using multiple machines and multiple Aperture libraries. If you have an album inside a project that contains images that actually live in a different project, all of the masters and versions for those images will be exported when using file export project if you check the consolidate masters option in the export library/project dialog. This means that they will actually be part of that library when you import it into another Aperture library. This can be very useful but just be aware that this is the way it works. In fact any other Aperture functionality like light tables, etc. that works a lot like an album will also behave this way.

Stacks

Stacks are yet another way of grouping images together but there are some specific behaviors that are confusing and maybe even vexing for the uninitiated. A stack looks like this. Sort of a darker grey cloud surrounding a group of

images. This stack is open showing you the four images contained in the stack. If it were closed the image at the front (left side with number plastered in the corner) would be the only one that you would see. You would know it was part of a stack because it would still have that number four up in the cor-

ner. That image that is all the way on the left when the stack is open is called the stack pick. Notice that I said all the way at the left but earlier I also said the one that shows up when the stack is closed. This part is really important to understand. See the second image in? It has a check mark on the top of it. This image is called the album pick. If you were looking at this stack in a project browser (you clicked on the little yellow project box) and the stack was closed the stack pick would show up with the number four. In this case we are looking at the stack in an album. How do we know that? We know because that check mark is there at all. In an album when that stack is closed the album pick is the one that shows up. That album pick can be the stack pick

or it can be any other image in the stack. Every album that the stack shows up in can have a different album pick. Try it your-self so that you can really wrap your head around this because it is extremely useful as you will see in a minute.

1.Go to any project you have, pick any image that you have, select it and hit option-v four times. You now have a stack with four versions.

There are two types of slideshows in Aperture 3. The first kind is “on the fly” it works on any selection of images via the File->Play Slideshow menu. The sec-ond kind you create specifically using the New->Slideshow menu. They are very different things. I use them both.

Make sure you set Aperture 3 to automatically stack new versions in Aperture 3 preferences. The setting is under the general preferences tab.

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2. Leave the first one alone and one by one make the other three completely different with some radical adjust-ments applied to each one.

3. Real quick with the top image selected use the context menu and choose new->album (or command-L four times. Make sure that the dialog that pops up for the new album has the “add selected items to new album” checked.

4. Go to each of the albums that you created one by one and in each select each image in sequence and use the stack->set album pick (or shift-command-\) You have now made each different version the album pick in each of the four albums.

5. Now close and open the stacks in each album by clicking on that number 4 in the corner. Do it a bunch of times. Wow, see how each album a different image shows up when the stack is closed? Cool - this is important for the rest of the discussion. For the most part stacks are the most powerful when they are closed.

There are way easier ways to make album picks as we will see in an example or two but there are a couple of things that you may have noticed that I want to explain first. If an image is in a stack you cannot place it in an album or any other type of container in Aperture without it bringing the whole stack along with it. That’s okay, remember nothing is being copied and it is pretty much free from a storage perspective to have those stacks / versions / images show up in a million different places and that is why there is such a thing as an album pick. The other thing that I wanted to explain is why I keep using the word image when referring to things in stacks instead of using the word version. The reason is that stacks are designed as containers for the overall concept of versions not just the strict Aperture definition of versions, as in versions all pointing at the same master. Stacks can contain 8 different shots that you took of the same thing if you want. You can put those shots into a stack yourself either manually or using the auto stack function. This is great and I use auto stack with some manual tweaking all the time, especially when shooting fashion and portraits. I usually go through my unaltered, unadjusted images using stack mode and pick my favorite as the stack pick before doing anything else. The other way that images get into a stack is automagically when you either duplicate a version, create a new version from the master, or last but not least when you use “edit with…” and send an image(version) out to an external editor/plug-in.

Let’s bring it all home with an example or two of how this all comes together. If you just let your stacks lay around at the top level of your project creating new versions willy-nilly you will soon end up with a big unorganized mess of a stack, especially if you have a bunch of different shots that you took of the same thing in that stack as well as new versions based on one or more masters. That is where albums come in and the real power of stacks combined with stack picks and album picks. Stacks are really powerful when they are closed so a great keyboard shortcut to remem-ber is option-; it closes all stacks in whatever you happen to be looking at.

Let’s say you do portraits or beauty head shots, like I do. Most of my customers want the final prints to fit into a tra-ditional 8x10 image format. So here is my workflow using stacks and albums.

1. Import my project.

2. I use auto stack to get all of the similar shots (shots that I took in rapid succession) into a stack. Using the browser I fine tune the stacks to make sure that the right images are together in a stack.

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3. Go into full screen mode, Turn on stack mode. Take about 10 minutes to go through hundreds of images using key-board shortcuts and make my stack picks so the best of the bunch show up at the top of each stack. Change to “view multiple”, in other words turn off stack mode.

4. Close all of the stacks in the viewer.

5. Select everything and use new->album and name it 8x10

6. Go to that album, close all the stacks, select everything and use duplicate version (I happen to just hit option-V)

7. Deselect everything and click on the first image, use the crop tool with the appropriate aspect ratio constraint and crop the image

8. Hit the lift and stamp tool and uncheck everything but the adjustments in the lift and stamp HUD, open the ad-justments section and get rid of everything but the crop using the delete key.

9. Invert the selection so all of the other images in the album are selected and hit stamp selected images.

10. Go through each image real quick after selecting the crop tool to move the crop a bit if I need to. Take note I se-lect the crop tool and use the arrow keys to move from image to image. After adjusting the crop with the mouse I do not hit enter. I am still in the crop tool and never leave it as I change images.

Step 4-11 takes me quite literally about a minute or two with hundreds of images. What these steps just did is in a couple of simple steps left me with a new album where my new 8x10 versions of hundreds of images are the album picks and are therefore the ones that you see and select when the stacks are closed. The reason is that when you create a new version while looking at an album it automatically becomes the album pick for that particular album. Note that the overall stack pick when looking at the project itself is still the original version. Let’s take it a step further for you wedding guys/gals out there. Now that I have my 8x10s, let’s do black and whites of all the 8x10s. Right click on the 8x10 album and choose duplicate album. Name it black and white. Close all the stacks, select everything, duplicate versions. Bang, if you are using keyboard shortcuts that was three keystrokes. You should know what to do now, just do a monochrome mixer to one of the images and stamp the rest. Now within about 3 seconds you have another al-bum where the black and white 8x10’s are the ones that show up when the stacks are closed. As I mentioned stacks are the most powerful when they are closed.

There are numerous different viewer/browser modes within Aperture accessed through the View->Main viewer menu. Show multiple is the most commonly used but I find both stack mode and compare mode very productive. Try them out and see what they do. You will use them more effectively if you learn the shortcut keys

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Smart albums

Smart albums are a lot like regular old albums with a lot of the same properties that we have reviewed and a couple of different properties that we will look at in a little more depth. As everybody that has read this far probably already knows smart albums collect images dynamically based on criteria that you define I will not focus too much on this. What I will focus on are some ways that I use them and hopefully give you some new ideas of how you might find creative ways to use them. Like regular albums you can order images any way that you like ex-cept if they pick up new images based on data that changes in your library those will show up at the end of the sequence, one of the reasons that I do not use them for slide shows or to keep track of exports that I may need to reproduce.

You can create smart albums with any number and combination of criteria that you wish with any degree of complexity. I typi-cally use them in fairly broad brush kinds of collections that I

really want to update dynamically or using keywords that I know I use a lot. For example, I always tag shots for model portfolios, model tests, and portrait sessions as headshot, 3/4, and full length. I do this a lot with fashion jobs as well so I typically create smart albums to collect these dy-namically both within a project and at various levels in my li-brary (more on this a little later we discuss folders). You can see an example on the left. These typically are looking for keywords and a rating. A lot of you may argue that I could have used smart albums for some of the albums that I talked about in the last section and you would be right. It’s a matter of personal preference in most cases and speed, ease, and productivity in others. You make the choice. What I have found is that If I do searches for something more than once, like the second time I do it I’ll just turn it into a smart album that way I will save time in not having to redo that criteria anymore. What I have also found is that if I want a collection that automagically adds images I will create a smart album. I look at the difference this way - Smart albums are broad, getting you to a general view of what you are looking for. Plain old albums are for very specific collections for very specific purposes. If you want to use only smart albums feel free if you ever make selections from those smart albums as in shift-clicking or command-clicking you may want to con-sider a regular old album, especially if you ever think you will have to do that again. Could you add a keyword while you have that set of things selected and add yet another smart album with one more criteria, sure you could but I would suggest a regular album may be more practical.

Smart albums are context sensitive. In other words if you create a 5-star album inside of a project it only gathers im-ages inside of that project. If you create the same album at the top of your library it collects images from all the pro-jects in that library. This context sensitivity is intuitive and will actually become more important and more useful when we talk about some other features like folders. What is not obvious but can be useful is that smart albums re-tain the context from where they were originally created in even if you move them to a completely different place. They keep on showing images that they were showing and will continue to collect new images if any new images meet the search criteria. When you are looking at the smart album search criteria note the line near the top labeled

You can create new projects via a template in Aper-ture 3. I find that this is most useful for creating a series of smart albums that I always have inside cer-tain kinds of projects. You can do this by right click-ing on a project and choosing duplicate project struc-ture. I find it helps to keep empty projects with only the items I want to use as a template.

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“source”. If you have created the smart album inside a project and have a very simple library you will see “Library” and the name of the project name in that source line. If you drag that smart album to a different project you will see that the source line does not change. By clicking on the “Library” or project name tags in the smart album search cri-teria you can tell Aperture that you want the smart album to search the entire library or just the project that the smart album was created in. What you cannot do is change the sources to a new and different project, even if you move the smart album to the project you are trying to target. The source line will always be the same as when it was originally created. More accurately the source line will be the same and it will include the entire folder hierarchy from where it was created. More on this later.

Try it yourself to see what I am talking about. Inside of any project that you have either duplicate or create a smart album and look at the images in it. Now drag it to another project and look at it. The same images show up and im-ages that meet the criteria in the new project do not show up. Now go back to the project where it came from and change the metadata for an image that did not meet the criteria. It will immediately show up in that album that you moved. Pretty neat but what can you do with it? Well one thing I do is create smart albums with varying criteria spe-cifically to collect images used to create books that I send out periodically. The books are typically promotional mate-rials targeted at a specific market. I usually want to make sure they are fresh. They always contain images that span multiple projects. Since you have to create a book inside a project I have a project called “Fashion Promo Book”. The project contains no masters or versions just the book. I create smart albums that collect images from all over my li-brary specifically for this purpose and move those smart albums into the book project for the sake of keeping every-thing related to the book together. I then drag images from those smart albums to the actual book.

One practical tip for smart albums that I can give you is to avoid using full text searches to build your smart album. I guess they are fine for quick and dirty work within smallish projects but they will perform poorly at the library level as your library grows. One other word of advice that sort of contradicts my literal words about using really complex smart albums instead of regular albums that I will give just in case you may have missed my sarcasm there is that I would personally avoid building an organization completely on really complex smart albums that are super specific. As your needs change and your use of Aperture changes, as your use of metadata changes, and if you change your keyword hierarchy and structure you will end up with some really nasty surprises.

Albums and Stacks

The combination of albums, stacks, and album picks within those albums is probably the most important concept related to organizing your images. It deserves even additional clarification along with some practical advice and ex-amples. In the last section I gave a step by step example of a mini-workflow. I want to expand on that and really try to explain that each of the features that I pointed out in and of themselves are all well and good but the real power of Aperture is in how those things work together. While discussing this I am going to talk about the order in which I do things and why. Aperture does not force you to do anything in any specific order. For the most part that is good. You can always discover or refine the way various Aperture functions operate together and sequence them so that they best fit your needs. The big problem is that the Aperture documentation does not do a great job explaining how all it’s functionality comes together to produce a workflow. It is up to you to figure that out and you really need a good understanding of all of them to understand any of them. I am going to try to distill the countless hours of work that I have done figuring this out into as few words as possible by way of the way I do things and through negative exam-ples of some of the things you may have thought or questioned.

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Albums Are Your Workflow

Stacks without albums are not very useful. In combination with albums and especially album picks, stacks are ex-tremely useful. A large number of people that are only beginning to become familiar with Aperture spend a lot of time literally fighting against stacks. They question why the heck Aperture automatically puts new versions in a stack with the original. They drag a specific version into an album and wonder why the whole stack shows up when they only want that version. They ask that question on the support forums and they ask how they can stop Aperture from doing that. They spend a whole lot of time disorganizing their images by extracting them from the stack so that only a single version shows up. Obviously you know that the album pick is the answer to this.

There are a couple of other things that you should also understand from that example that are much more subtle than the obvious but are actually extremely important. Stacks are far more useful when they are closed than when they are open. I mentioned this more than once so far, it is also why I mentioned the shortcut key to close them all in any view you happen to be looking at. When a stack is closed and you select all of the images with a single keystroke only the

album picks are selected, not the entire stack. Very rarely do I ever open stacks on purpose after the initial steps in my work-flow. When I do open a stack it is almost always an individual stack and not all of the stacks in a view. The fact that you can open a stack and see all of the various versions associated with each other is very useful. With one click or key I can see every different post production treatment, variation of the same shot I took, etc. Usually this is when looking into a very specific image to see if there is an alternate that is more appropriate for my

portfolio vs the final that a customer choose, etc. If all you have is gigantic stacks with a dozen variations without albums organizing what images show up at the top I can see how people would fight against them. As a general rule if you are creating a new version you probably should not be doing it without an associated album that uses that ver-sion as an album pick. If you have a bunch of albums they should all have an album pick and the stacks should probably be closed otherwise it is just a big mess.

Here is another subtle point, albums are not only for grouping images that you want to see together for aesthetic purposes like I want an album of all of the pictures of Aunt Suzie and Grandma Kate in them together. Of course you use them for that to but they are actually very powerful workflow tools for keeping track of what you do and why you did it. Every thing from post processing revisions, alternate aspect ratios, alternate picks from the same sequence, to different exports with various ordering and file naming specs. I told you that I use the hell out of albums, I don’t do this just to juxtaposition various images together. I do this to improve and organize my image workflow. A corol-lary to this is that when using albums as a workflow tool the best way of making albums is usually not by dragging individual images into the album. The best way to make an image an album pick is usually not individually. You can do that if there is a good reason to work that way but for the most part you should not be doing that for all of the albums that you create. It is a tedious time wasting activity.

When creating a new album that corresponds to some workflow step the best way to do this is create the album and make the album picks at the same time. Say you are starting out with a bunch of images in a project that are in big unorganized stacks. Some of those stacks have a black and white version and some don’t. Your goal is to create an album with all of the images with a black and white version and have those versions as the album pick. You could drag each image into the album individually but doing that would not make the black and white version the album

There is one nasty surprise with stack behavior when they are closed. If you want to delete only the version that is on the top of the stack then you must select all with the stacks closed, open all the stacks, then delete the versions otherwise you will delete all the versions in the stack..

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pick so you would have to go into that album and make each black and white version the album pick manually. A far better way is to select all of the black and white versions and use the “new album” menu or shortcut. When you do this all of the selected version are automatically made the album pick in the new album. Heck you can even use the search HUD to filter all of the versions that have black and white adjustments.

Expanding on the principle that you should get the most bang for the buck when creating albums and album picks are some thoughts on creating versions. Say you need to create an album of alternate aspect ratios as in my previous mini-workflow example. If you have all of the best variations you shot at the top of the stack and all of your ratings done this is a breeze. Close all the stacks, do a search for say 3 stars and above, select all of the images and use new album from selection. After making the new album make sure the stacks are closed and create a new version for all of them with duplicate version. Those new versions will all now be your album picks for your 8x10 aspect ratio album and show up at the top when you close all the stacks again. You can do this over and over again for all of your workflow while never having to individually make various things the album pick. After the first time you don’t even need to do the 3 star search again, just duplicate one of the albums.

Albums, Album Picks, and Workflow Sequence

Now another subtle point may be coming into focus for you. The order that you choose to do things can be important in saving you a lot of time and effort in what you want to accomplish. I do not believe that one order or one way of doing things is the optimal way to do it for every person’s needs. The most I can do is give you a general explanation of the order that I do things along with the reason I do them in that order. From this you should be able to formulate the optimum sequence for what you need to accomplish. Don’t sweat it too much, it is not do or die ultra critical and without a doubt you will refine whatever you are doing down the road.

I mentioned that the first thing I do is use auto-stack to put similar shots together. I cannot emphasize enough how valuable this is for me. You can use auto-stack any time after import via the stack menu. Auto-stack works by looking at the image cap-ture date and time. Assuming you are using a digital camera the capture date is recorded with 1/100 of a second resolution. Us-ing the slider to fine tune what images are stacked together is useful for just about any photographic subject matter. If you are

shooting fashion or head shots and shooting extremely fast most of your images that are the same will be within a second or two of each other with lighting variations, pose variations, angle variations, etc having a little more time in between. If you are a landscape or still life photographer there maybe many many seconds to a few minutes between variations of the same image with many more minutes between different images. Merely adjusting the time slider will usually prove to get you 99% of the way to accumulating variations of the same shot into the same stack. Your definition of the same shot will vary. In general I have found that going a little overboard is better than going under on the auto-stack. The reason is that it is quicker and easier to either split one stack into two or extract a single image from a stack than it is to combine images into one stack. Not that that is a big deal but if you want to be really fast take my advise.

If you have an album containing lift and stamped cropped versions if you select the crop tool from the toolbar you will be able to see the crop and use the mouse to move or adjust it as you arrow through each image. Just move to the next image instead of hitting enter or otherwise closing the crop tool. This way you save a bunch of wasted motion reselecting the tool for each image

The “Z” key is a far better and quicker tool to use to evaluate the detail of two images than the loupe tool while in stack or compare mode. It will simultane-ously zoom both images to 100% and allow you to scroll both of them at the same time by holding down shift - space and using the mouse.

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After the auto-stack I usually do a once through and accomplish a few things very quickly in that pass. I reject images that are a total loss (your definition will vary). I keyword all of the images with keyword buttons/shortcuts that I have setup before I do the pass. Last but not least I fine tune the stack by splitting stacks and extracting images, infre-quently to I need to combine them. The bottom line is after that pass most of my image stacks are finalized, most of my keywords are done and all I am looking at are not rejects. The mission now is to get the best variation to the top of the stack. I mentioned stack mode - you may have stumbled across this but if you haven’t you activate stack mode using the view->main viewer menu, or a short cut key. Stack mode is amazing at getting to your stack picks quickly. When you enter this mode the current top of the stack shows up on the left with the next image in line on the right. Using command-\ will set the image on the right (the compare image) to the stack pick and automatically move to the next image in the stack. If you want to leave the stack pick be, the right arrow key moves to the next image in line. You don’t even need to keep track of where you are, at the end of the current stack the right arrow key doesn’t do anything. To go to the next stack use the down arrow key. I use this in full screen mode and honestly I can get my stack picks for 1000+ in minutes this way. It is so fast that I usually sleep on it and do another pass the next day be-fore doing anything else.

Once my stack picks are in place as a matter of practice I do not change them. They may have some basic Aperture adjustments applied but are the original crop, have not gone through an external editor, etc. I always use new ver-sions and albums for those. The stack pick is special because it has some functionality that other images do not - not even album picks. The first thing is that it is automatically the default album pick for new albums that you create if you select the images out of the project view. This makes it easier to create a new version set based on the original capture as opposed to say having the final cropped and photoshop edited version as the ultimate stack pick. For that I have an album that has it’s album picks as the finals. If you need another mechanism to search for final versions

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globally you can use a thousand other ways, like a keyword indicator, or a custom metadata field. The other special thing about overall stack picks is that there is a checkbox in every search HUD that will restrict the search to a stack pick or not. You can check this box and reduce a ton of visual noise in smart albums or any other search. You will still know that the image is in a stack that has 34 other

versions in it. You can easily see what project con-tains that image by looking at the project name metadata under the “other” category. You can even jump to the pro-ject containing the image using the context menu “Show in project”. I have the project name added to my viewer me-tadata set so I can call it up with one key. If I want to get to specific versions of the same image I just use other criteria and do not check the stack picks only box.

Okay - after stack picks are in place and for the most part set in stone I rate my images with the stacks closed. This takes me about 2 minutes. You heard that right, the stacks are closed, I only rate the images that are stack picks. You may be thinking but there could be a bunch of similar things I shot that are almost identical that will have no rating. Yep - I sweated over this for a while. In the end this is better for me. The stack keeps track that I have 5 star image that has simi-lar stuff with no rating. By doing this in this order every varia-tion that I have of the same master will also have 5 stars but versions that I do not use will have none. This cuts down on search noise - if I want to see the variations that I actually shot it is usually for a very specific image - not any thing I want to see a bunch of them for. All of the versions that I create from this point on will most likely also get some additional metadata tags that tell me exactly why they exist. A lot of them are standard for me, some of them are there by default like “PSD” in the file name/file type. I end up with all images that are at the top of the stack or at the top of the stack in an album with ratings - every one. If they do not have a rating they do not show up anywhere with the stack closed.

From this point I create the different post production versions that I need via either Aperture adjustments or using an external editor. The order that I do those is very consistent as well. I use the original aspect ratio and crop with only color, contrast, and other basic adjustments to send to external editors. I do all of my aspect ratio changes after that in Aperture. I do things this way because it saves me time. For instance you never know when you will need a different aspect ratio crop of an image to suit a layout or a need down the road, why would you crop it before sending it to photoshop. or within photoshop? Do it later to the Photoshop version in a new album with a specific intent. Your milage may vary, only you will be able to refine a workflow that best suits your needs but I hope this gives you some ideas on how to approach it.

Album Pick Quirks

One thing to keep in mind when using Aperture is that it is not perfect - yet. The key to using it effectively is being creative when putting it’s capabilities together in a way that suits your needs. I hope that you can see that this is true based on the discussion so far, even where Aperture is just about perfect. It is even more true when you run across an

All of the ratings that I use mean something to my workflow. Trying to come up with a rating system that somehow rates images comparatively across your entire library and across every photo endeavor is a waste of time. If you have a way great if not I would advise that you only thing about ratings for the pro-ject at hand. For my purposes ratings of 1 to 3 cannot be compared across projects let alone genres. Ratings of 4 or 5 have a global meaning, at least within a genre.

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irritating quirk. In cases where it is far from perfect. Remember I told you that if you create a new version in the con-text of an album that it will automatically become the album pick? Well in the past if you use plug-ins or more spe-cifically an external editor like Photoshop this is not always the case. In fact if you use Photoshop via “edit with…” it is never the case. Even though this is not the case with Aperture 3, your immediate reaction will probably be some cursing and anger and fits of rage because now you have to go and remember to make each Photoshop edited version the album pick by hand. It is even more frustrating because even if you select all of the Photoshop edited versions in the album “make album pick” does not work on all of them.

Even though this quirk is fixed in Aperture 3 I left this example in because it illustrates how to use a combination of Aperture’s features to get to a place you want to be. It is just as useful if you forgot to make a new album to represent all of your Photoshop post processing versions and did it from the project view. Here is a solution to deal with that but more importantly a metaphor for working out a workflow that meets your needs by combining various functions of Aperture creatively. The other reason I left it in is that I still think it is quirky that “set album pick” menu item or shortcut key does not work on the entire selection it works only on the “primary” image in the selection. This is one of the only things that works this way.

To deal with this make the new album for all of your Photoshop edited images as you would for any other workflow related album. Do all of your Photoshop dirty work. In that album do a search for file names with PSD, select them all. Then instead of trying in vane to use “set album pick” to no avail, use create new album from selection. All of the PSD files selected will be the album pick in the new album. Delete the old album. This may take you an additional 2 or 3 seconds versus the way you would like it to work but way better than trying to beat your head against the quirk and letting it force you into doing it the least efficient way.

Stack Mode and Compare Mode

I have mentioned stack mode more than a few times while explaining stacks. I find that it is more useful when com-paring related images as long as you buy into the concept of related images being grouped together in stacks. The relationship is yours to define. Most of the time my definition of related images are the exact same framing, lighting, and angle of the shots with minor facial expression differences and posing differences. Your definition may be differ-ent depending on what you shoot. It doesn’t matter, I still find stack mode more useful than compare mode for get-ting to stack picks and shot variations. You may be asking “So what is compare mode for”?

For my uses compare mode is useful for getting to selects or your favorite images that you are going to send to clients as the final shots. Selects are not stack picks. Selects are the best of the bunch or the selection among your stack picks. In other words compare mode is for comparing your stack picks to each other. It works just like stack mode and you get to it the same way. The view menu or a shortcut key. The only difference is that it goes through all of the images that are showing in the current browser and has no notion of stacks. If stacks are closed compare mode will only show images that are on the top of the stacks for whatever that browser is looking at. The other difference is that to swap the select with the compare image you hit the enter key. The select has no special properties as it does in stack mode. When you swap images nothing else happens, it doesn’t flag the image in any way. You can see that this is only useful if you are comparing some subset of images in order to evaluate ranking or rating in some way. For ex-ample I do this when I have to deliver a 3/4 length and a full length shot for a specific product. I use compare mode

If you select multiple images and want to do anything to all of them the general rule is that short-cut keys and menus will affect all the images in the selection. The HUD’s and inspectors will only affect the pri-mary selection - the one with the thick white border.

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on an album of all the 3/4 length shots that I have for that product. Saying it another way is that I find stack mode

valuable at the beginning of my workflow and compare mode valuable more towards the end of my workflow.

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FoldersWay back in the olden days before Aperture 3 there were two distinct types of folders, yellow and blue. You could see what was what fairly obviously. With Aperture 3 there are still two distinct sets of functionality but now they are both the same color, blue. I guess someone decided that two different colors was too confusing, thank god they didn’t think the two types of functionality were too confusing because they are very powerful. I assume the color change was to make Aperture look “easier”, sort of like that stupid cork board background somehow makes Faces “easier”, more on Faces a bit later, let’s move on to folders in all their glory.

Folders Within A Project

Folders inside of projects are really simple. If you create a folder and you happen to be looking at or clicked on a pro-ject you will get a folder. The only purpose of a folder inside of a project is to put stuff like albums, books, smart al-bums, slide shows, etc. that belongs together in one spot. They are not for subdividing your actual images, they are for storing other Aperture objects that you can create inside of a project. If you have a ton of stuff inside a project like a bunch of light tables, albums, smart albums, web journals, etc. They are all listed alphabetically. This can be a lot of visual noise and actually waste a lot of time looking for what you want.Folders allow you to get rid of some of that visual noise. I don’t have any hard and fast rules as to what I put into a yellow folder, I usually just do what makes sense for the project. In some cases where I have a ton of albums I will make a yellow folder for albums, same goes for smart albums but I don’t stick to just putting all of the same types of things to-gether. I put things together that are purpose driven as well.

An example would be something that has already shown up on the laptop library that I am using to write this article. In the project “Ghost Ships” to the right I have two folders. As you can see one is called “Albums”, it contains albums. I did this because I know that this particular project is going to get way more complex real fast. The other folder is called “Print”. This contains a couple of light tables and some books. This is something that I do regularly. I almost always use a light table to play around with they way images relate to each other and to color match or fine tune adjust-ments when looking at images right next to each other to get some rough layout ideas before working on a book design. In my head the broad brushed fooling around with relationships, image con-text, and other rough visual ideas goes with the nitty gritty layout job of book design.

You will probably find the same need for grouping a couple of different types of things together that relate to some task with whatever your photographic endeavors happen to be. I do a boat load of slide presentations and I have projects with folders called “slide shows” They contain images that are arranged for specific slideshows to specific audiences. I have folders

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called web in a lot of projects. These typically contain web pages, albums called “flickr export”, albums called “site upload”, etc.

A couple of notes to wrap up the simple folder inside of a project topic. Folders do not restrict context for “smart” items such as smart albums when they exist within a project. If you create a smart thingy inside a Folder it will still pickup everything that meets the search criteria inside the whole project. That being said, they do have a tiny little piece of context related functionality. If you click on a folder that exists inside a project the browser will only show the images contained in the stuff within that folder and if you use the browser search box the search will be limited to those items. Another obvious feature of folders inside project but something worth mentioning is that you can either drag project items into a yellow folder or click on the folder and then create the item, that item will then be contained in that folder. Last and definitely least of the useful information, you can nest folders if you have tons and tons of stuff inside of a single project or if you are just really hierarchical and love folders inside of folders inside of folders (If you find a great use for this let me know - I can’t see one and honestly never have nested folders inside of a project)

Now here is a strange, weird, and not so wonderful thing for the curious and demented that care (caution we are going into interesting but useless territory here) - when you click on a folder that contains a smart album the images in the smart album will not show up. If there is other stuff, say a regular album in the folder, the images in that will show up, if you do a browser search only images that are in stuff (not the smart album) inside that folder and meet the criteria will show in the browser. If you click on “create smart album” a smart album will be created but the search context will be the whole project and everything that meets the search criteria will again show up in that al-bum.

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Folders Outside A Project

Folders outside of a project, aahhhh, Folders out side of a project come into being when you create a new folder at the library level or if you create a folder when you are clicked on folder outside of a project. When folders live outside of a project, they can contain multiple projects. In addition to just organizing and group-ing related projects together they also have some other functionality to offer. Throughout this article I have mentioned that I photograph numerous different genres of work. Some fashion and beauty / portrait work, commercial product work, per-sonal documentary projects, obviously the family stuff, travel, holidays, etc. Most photographers amateur or professional have a similar diversity of subject matter that they enjoy photographing. I typically need to create portfolios, presentations, web content, etc that needs to be constrained to a

particular subset of what I shoot. The great thing about blue folders is the effect that they have of restricting context.

Most smart albums at the top level of the library don’t do me much good. I don’t want my 5 star fashion images mixed with my 5 star images of Christmas 2006, etc. Instead I have a folder that contains all of the projects that I do for my fashion clients, lighting workshops, travel, family, documentary, etc. If I create 5 star smart albums within each of these folders the search is restricted to just the projects contained inside that folder. So now it’s easy to get to my portfolio images for each genre or subject matter that I shoot. Yea, I could use insanely complicated smart albums to get all of the images of my grandma Emma and exclude all of the lingerie catalog work with models named Emma, etc. but why bother, just use the context restricting properties of folders

Like folders inside of projects, if you click on them the viewer will show all of the images contained in every project contained in that folder. If you use the search box in the viewer the search will be restricted to only those images. This saves a bunch of time, maybe it’s not that big a deal when you only have 1000 images but I can tell you it is a huge deal when you have 300,000.

A couple of notes regarding folders when they are actually containing projects or other folders. You can them, in other words folders can contain other folders. This property is shared with folders inside of a project but in this case is actually useful. For example I have a blue folder for all of the fashion work that I do. It contains other blue folders, one for each client I work with. Each client blue folder contains all of the projects that I have done for that client. When you are importing images that you have just shot have you noticed that the easy way to put them into a brand new project is select that option under Aperture library in the destination drop down menu while looking at the im-port panel? The same thing works if you click on a folder while using the import panel, except the new project is automatically placed inside that folder that you clicked on.

Folders are easy to rearrange as well just drag projects into them or out of them into other ones. It take no time and nothing actually moves anywhere so folders are just about free from a computing resource perspective as well. If you haven’t noticed yet, Aperture 3 finally allows you to select multiple things within the project inspector using com-mand click, shift click, all the normal ways of doing that. This makes it a breeze to completely reorganize all of your projects and folders into a nice neat hierarchy. It is so easy that you can change your mind later and it is no big deal C o p y r i g h t © 2 0 0 9 R o b e r t W B o y e r! A p e r t u r e 3 O r g a n i z a t i o n

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FacesGetting Started

Brand spanking new for Aperture 3 is the Faces feature, if you have played around at all with iPhoto or are moving from iPhoto to Aperture then you know what the Faces feature does. It attempts to recognize “faces” in your images and associate and index of people with the photographs that they appear in. The technology is by no means perfect. In fact some of the things that Faces identifies as a face and who it belongs to are actually highly entertaining. If you squint real hard on some of the mis-guesses you might even be able to see the resemblance of that hubcap to Aunt Jean.

Most of the criticism that I have for Faces has nothing to do with how well the technology does or doesn’t work, in truth it is pretty good and errs on the side of including rather than excluding possible matches. My criticism has to do mostly with two factors completely within Apple’s control. The first factor is that the user interface is clumsy at best. The second factor is that the functionality is not really integrated in a meaningful way with the rest of Aperture’s highly developed tool set related to organizing your images, metadata, and work-flow. Faces somehow feels like an unwieldy appendage grafted on to the side of Aperture instead of elegantly integrated into the rest of Aperture’s bag of tricks.

I will somewhat painstakingly walk through the way that the user interface works at the risk of being redundant with the user manual but I feel compelled to do so because my experience shows that it’s not at all intuitive how to go about dealing with Faces when starting to use Aperture. With that said the worst way to get started with Faces is to click on the Faces icon while looking at all of your photos or all of your projects. Doing that will probably cause you to fiddle with it for about 10 minutes and declare that Faces is useless and far too much trouble to bother with - key-words are easier and quicker. The way to start out with Faces is at the project level, project by project. Like everything else in Aperture, Faces is context sensitive. The Faces that are being addressed are limited to one project if you hap-pen to be looking at a project. If you are looking at a folder of projects, the the images and individual faces targeted by the Faces feature will be only those within the contained projects.

User Interface

Let’s cover what I have found to be the most productive work-flow for the Faces feature with a walk-through of how to use faces on a brand new project. I will be referencing the illustrations throughout the user interface discussion to save on the number of words required and to more clearly demonstrate some of my recommendations.

I am going to start off with a freshly imported project that contains five different people in about 50 images. For the most part all of the images have at least four of those people in them. Let’s jump right in by clicking the Faces icon up in the toolbar. One of the things I cannot stand is that when you do this, you are now in “Faces mode”, meaning that nothing works the way it does in the rest of Aperture. Not a big deal but definitely different than what you expect if you are a long time Aperture user. If you try to use any of your usual shortcut keys to say change the viewer/browser

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like the V key, nothing will happen but an annoyingly loud bonk reminding you that you need to get out of “Faces

mode” to do anything but faces stuff.

You will notice that right off the bat Faces has picked up a couple of people that it already knows about from other projects. Some of them may actually be correct, like the first one in figure 1. Since you are presented with the option of either confirming, rejecting the recommendation, or typing in your own name for each face at the bottom in the “unconfirmed faces” strip at the bottom of the screen you may think that this is the best way to proceed. It’s not, well for the most part it’s not. The best way to proceed is to just take the first face that appears in that bottom strip and

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type in the persons name or in my case confirm it if it correct. After doing that, the worst way to use faces is to sit

there confirming, rejecting, or typing names into that little strip.

Instead of doing all of your work image by image, the best way is to double click that first confirmed“face” you now have at the top of your screen, this will get you to a view of all the currently confirmed images that contain that per-son as well as all of the unconfirmed suggestions for that person as seen in figure 2. Now we are in high volume mode for that single face. Here you will see on the top half of the screen all of the confirmed images for that person. On the bottom half of the screen you will see all of Aperture’s suggested matches. To confirm or reject the suggestions click on the “confirm faces” button at the bottom of the screen. The secret here is to either confirm or reject all of the suggestions on a massive scale very quickly. The way that this works is by clicking or option-clicking on each sugges-tion. Regular clicking confirms an image if it in a state of “suggested match”. Option-clicking rejects an image if it is in a state of “suggested match”. Both will toggle an image if it has already been confirmed or rejected. The fast way is to drag or option-drag a selection box around the suggested images. Doing this confirms or rejects images as a batch

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as you can see in figure 3. Here I am confirming all of them but the one wrong one which I will option click to reject

that one image. When you are done, hit the done button on the lower right of the screen.

What is likely to happen at this point is a few more image suggestions may show up for that person after you click done. This is because Faces now has a better idea of who is who. Just repeat the last step for the new suggestions. I have never had to do this more that twice in a regular sized project with a limited number of actual people. The prob-lem with trying to deal with your entire library at once is that there is not a good way to get to the confirms and re-jects for a person really quick. If your library is like mine there were no large groups to batch select or reject that were right next to each other with any rhyme or reason when I first fired up Faces. It’s far easier to deal with on a more limited bases when building the Faces database. The nice thing is the more information you give it the better Faces becomes.

Well that was easy enough, there has to be more to it right. For the most part no but here are a few well hidden other functions if you want to get serious about Aperture’s Faces. The first and simplest is the “not a face” function. If you right click on an image in the unnamed faces strip at the bottom of the Faces main interface - the view you get when you first click on that Faces icon in the toolbar, one of the menu options is called “not a face”. This is not super impor-tant but here is what it does - It removes the “face” from the faces database entirely. That little section of a hubcap or naughty bit that is not a face will stop being considered a face forever more. You may even be able to use it for nefari-ous purposes like keeping people from showing up in your global Faces view. From what I can see this is the one and only place you can get to this function. Nowhere else in Aperture does it seem to show up. This is entirely different than the “skip” button that shows up in the unnamed faces strip when hovering over an image. The only thing the “skip” button does is temporarily move on so more unnamed faces can show up in that strip, since you can’s scroll it.

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You maybe starting to see why I think that the initial user interface is a bit clunky by Apple’s standards, why the heck wouldn’t you be able to choose that function anywhere that Faces has suggestions?

There is one more thing and this one actually is important. I will call it the critical Faces function that you cannot ac-cess from anywhere inside “Faces mode”. In fact you have to be looking at a photo in the regular old browser or viewer to access this function. Did I say the user interface was clunky? How about non-sensical, this part reminds me of Lightroom. Anyway - if you are looking at a photo in one of the regular non-faces view, then you can access the

“Assign Names” function through the Metadata menu as seen in figure 4.

Using “Assign Names” you can add and delete the face detection boxes that are associated with the photo. You can also change or assign the name associated with each face detection box. Typically you use “Assign Names” to faces that were not automatically picked up by Faces. I assume that you can get rid of a face detection box that already exists and it will do the same thing as the “not a face” menu item we just discussed. As you can see from figure 4, there are three people that were not detected in this image. Most likely due to their proximity and that they are pro-

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files. I added 3 face detection boxes and assigned the right people’s names to each one as you can see in figure 5.

Making Use Of Faces

The built in functionality to use the Faces information is somewhat limited from my point of view. Of course you can use the global view to quickly search for all of the photos of a particular person. I use that all the time when I need an image of someone and I want a quick and dirty overview of what I happen to have on hand. That’s what the Photos/Faces buttons are for at the bottom of the Faces interface. When I am assigning Faces data I usually have it in Faces mode. When I am searching at a higher level in Faces I usually set it to Pho-tos. The other new Aperture 3 feature that really comes into it’s own when searching through Faces is the “show in project” con-text menu, letting you jump out of Faces and right into the project containing the image of interest.

The only thing that seems to be automated is Facebook image tagging. If you are a big fan of Facebook and share a lot of images with friends and family there, this feature is really cool. The way it works is that the email address that you setup for each face has to match the persons Facebook ID - if it doesn’t there may still be a tag but it won’t get associated with a specific Facebook user. If I was a wedding, event, or senior portrait photographer I would make this a huge marketing priority and maybe a huge time saver. Having family and friends of clients as prospective print buyers or future customers by tagging them in your photos has been a big boon to a lot of photographers I know. One word of warning, when the tagging feature works with Facebook it’s great. I have found that the automatic tagging to be somewhat unreliable. Sometimes the tags show up in Facebook, sometimes they don’t. I don’t know whether to blame Apple for this or Facebook. Given some of the other flakiness I have experienced on Facebook I will put my money that it is not an Aperture defect.

Although version one of the Faces features deserves some criticism in a few different areas, I am sure that it will get more and more refined with new and improved functionality as time goes on. Live with some of its quirks now and like most metadata related activities it will have a big payoff down the road. Right now even though the automated Faces specific functionality is a bit thin you can use it as full-fledged metadata anywhere you can do a search with in

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Aperture, on-the-fly or in smart albums, in any context just like any other metadata. This fact alone makes it very powerful. I use it even within a project to aid in assign-ing keywords. I filter on a face and then drag the appropriate keyword on to the entire bunch of them. You can do this at a global level if you have not been too too diligent on your keywords. If you order them by other criteria like date you can probably kill some location data, and occa-sion data as well. Yep I still keyword im-ages with names even though I have the faces data. I do this not for use within Aper-ture as that is covered by Faces but more for export of IPTC and use outside of Aper-ture. One of the things that would be nice is some of that kind of thing to be automated. Like the ability to assign various IPTC fields to a face and have that automatically embedded on export. I hope we see some additional polish and typical Apple innova-tion with Aperture Faces in the future, not

just iPhoto functionality jammed on the side.

PlacesGetting Started

Another one of the Aperture “biggie” new features is Places. I have found Places far more useful and entertaining than Faces for my photography. Even without a GPS it’s not a bad thing to practice assigning map locations to where you were shooting. Just like any metadata, it takes some discipline and tenacity to put it in but the rewards of having it down the road are fantastic. As with the rest of the spirt of this book I am not going to cover the step by step of Places in excruciating detail. The one or two screen casts that Apple has on it’s Aperture 3 product page do a reason-able job in a short amount of time covering the mechanics of how to associate places with your photos. Definitely take a look at them if you haven’t already done so. Instead I am going to cover the basic concepts and touch on the things that might not be so intuitive.

Places is not at all complicated to use but there can be some things that don’t jump out at you when you first fire it up. Just like what I already covered with Faces, you probably don’t want to just click the global Places icon at the top level of your library. Doing that is best after you have actually associated location data with your photographs, then you can have fun looking at all your pins on the map in the global library wide view. I have some of the same criti-cisms with Places as I did of Faces. It is somewhat modal, when you click on the Places icon in the toolbar you are in Places mode, and all of the stuff you can do is pretty much Places related - different from the way the rest of Aperture works. Again the data is somewhat disconnected from the rest of Aperture functionality but I expect that to evolve as

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time goes on. The good news is you can search via location data and create smart albums using location data. The really good news is that the GPS info is exported and embedded with files you send out of Aperture.

The place to start out is determining how to get location data associated with your images and then doing that project by project by navigating to the project and then clicking the Places icon in the toolbar. If you don’t have a camera with a GPS either built in or added on to it that encodes every shot with GPS data you need to associate that data in a separate step using a couple of different ways. I recommend that if you need to associate your location data using some second step that you do it immediately after import. Just like other metadata, if you don’t take care of it early and make it a habit, it will never get done.

Associating Location Data With Your Images

There are two places that assigning location metadata to your images can take place. The first and easiest place is outside of Aperture. In this case either your camera embeds GPS coordinates into each image file at the time you take the picture or you embed GPS data into your images prior to importing them into Aperture using some other soft-ware. Your camera doing this for you is the best possible circumstance. No extra effort, no additional steps, no time differences to worry about, etc. You doing it as a precursor to importing to Aperture has it’s benefits as well that we will discuss later. If your images have GPS coordinates embedded in them all of the Places functionality within Aper-ture are available and work wonderfully. In my opinion this is the best way to use Places.

The second place that you can associate location information with images is inside Aperture after you import. Aper-ture does try to make this operation quick and easy but there are some realities to be considered that I will discuss and hopefully help you avoid some heartache. If you do choose to do it within Aperture you have three choices of how to do it. We’ll briefly discuss each of these along with some notes about each.

The first way would be to manually assign locations. It might not occur to you that you can just pick a spot on the map. Create a location point and attach that location to your images but you can and it is a perfectly valid way to use places for us normal people. If you are the kind of person that worries about your GPS accuracy because it is off by 3 feet, the manual way may not be for you. Just so you know how this works I walk through it quickly. In any project enter Places by clicking on the Places icon in the tool bar. Assuming you don’t have any locations assigned to any of the photos in the project you will see a map of the world. You could waste a bunch of time zooming and panning around to where you took the photos but instead you might want to just search for the address, or the name of the place using the search box at the upper right. It’s like magic, it works just like google maps because it is google maps. In the example you see in figure 1. I just searched for the address of my brothers house where I spent Christmas a couple of years ago.

To assign a location to the images select the relevant images for the location you just looked up. In my case all of them were in the same place for this project. Drag them anywhere on the map and drop them. There you have it, your done. In my case I was using satellite view and I dropped them on my brother’s house roof. That may be off by a couple of feet one way or the other but it’s good enough for government work. I would call it a surgical strike. I am being a little facetious about this but I am doing it to make a point. You don’t need to deal with a whole lot of com-plexity and have a GPS to make very good use of Places in Aperture. I will even venture to say that you may be better off not using a handheld GPS if you do have one in some circumstances. Take the above project as a good example. Why the heck would I want to bother dealing with GPS date from a separate unit to accomplish the same thing? Think about it for a second and go through your projects. I will be that better than 50 percent of your projects can be

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handled with similar ease even if the photos are in multiple locations. I will also bet that if you are zoomed in on the map you can get darn close to where the image was actually shot just by looking at the photo. Something to consider before you religiously tote a GPS around for all of your photography.

The second way to associate location in-formation with your photographs within Aperture is to use your handy-dandy, al-ways at your side iPhone. The way that this works is that you take an image with your iPhone, which automatically has GPS data embedded into it. Inside Aperture choose the “Import GPS data from iPhone…” item under the GPS dropdown menu at the bottom left of the map. What this does is import those photos from your iPhone into Aperture and then make “special” purple waypoint icons on the map for each photo that was imported. From that point you proceed by selecting the appropriate photos from the bottom photo strip while in Places then dropping those photos onto one of the purple way points that were created. From my perspective this is not very different than the completely manual method that we discussed previously, unless of course you dutifully take one iPhone image for each DSLR image that you wish to tag but who the heck would do that?

The third way is to use a GPS track from a hand held GPS unit that you carry along with you on your photographic endeavors. This method is also covered in Apple video as well as a screen cast that is on my web site under the Aper-ture 3 category. I will run through the process with you and then cover some of the finer points. The first step is to import the GPS track that is associated with the photos that you want to assign location data to. This is easy enough, just use that GPS menu at the bottom left of the screen. There are two formats that Aperture support but the most common format is the Garmin GPX format. If you have a track format that doesn’t work grab one of the dozen free

converters out there and convert it to GPX prior to importing.

After importing you will see the track show ip on the map. To assign images to loca-tions, drag one image onto the track. Don’t drop it yet, you will notice that you will see time differential displayed for the image. That differential will change as you drag the photo along the imported GPS track. Get the time differential as close to zero as possible. If you can’t get it close then try a different image. This step is subtle and not explained very well by Apple. The reason

you cannot get it to zero on some photos is that the track does not contain a data point close enough to the time the actual photo was taken or you cannot drag it accurately enough because there are way way too many point in the location that you took the photo. In most cases using a different image for that track will be a better choice no matter which reason you cannot get a zero point. Once C o p y r i g h t © 2 0 0 9 R o b e r t W B o y e r! A p e r t u r e 3 O r g a n i z a t i o n

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you get a zero point, drop the image on the track. You will see a message pop up at the bottom of the map asking if you want to assign locations based on time as seen in figure 3. Most of the time this is what you will want to do when you are using a hand held GPS unit unless there is a very specific reason not to.

Just a couple of notes if you do use a hand-held GPS. First off, is time zones. Make sure that you set the time zone for all of your images to the correct time zone either dur-ing import in the import panel or after-wards using the Metadata menu prior to trying to use Places. Also note that most GPS track files have no concept of time zone so use the GPS drop down menu at the bottom of the map to set the time zone of the track immediately after you import it. This is really not a big deal but I have run into more than a couple of people where time math is just out of their purview, especially if daylight savings time is an issue or set incorrectly on the capture device. One last note for consideration, you may find that embedding your GPS information prior to import into Aperture more convienient. There are plenty of applications that do this for free. In general they are very easy to use and especially helpful if you use your master RAW image files in other applica-tions along with Aperture. I have been doing this long before Places was on the scene and it is how I work when car-rying a GPS. I find that for the most part it is easier than doing it in Aperture and gives you the advantage of embed-ding it in your RAW files and never having to worry about time zone math again. I personally use the manual place-ment within Aperture all the time when I am not carrying a GPS. I do a heck of a lot of shooting in one spot versus one shot here and other shot there and one a half mile away kind of thing. Give both a try and see what works out best for you but by all means use one of the convenient ways of getting location information assigned to your images.

Using Places

Well, besides looking at all the little red push-pin markers all over the map and being able to jump to them at will, what else can you do with Places? For one you can search based on place. This is more powerful than you may think. You don’t have to search by any specific place. Your search can be as narrow or as general as you like it to be. It has the full power of the Google Maps hierarchy behind it so it works intuitively. In my case if I search for Maryland ei-ther as a text search or in the special Places search box in any of the search HUD’s it will cover all of the photos taken in Maryland and that is what will show up. You can do the same thing with cities, countries, counties, etc.

Since you can search by them you can also make smart albums via any combination of location data at any resolution you wish as well. You can do it by country or by continent or by state. This is freaking great. If you travel or are a travel photographer this has got to be the quickest cleanest way for you to get to photos. No more messing about creating your own folder hierarchies by hemisphere, continent, country, place. This is not only a time saver, it’s actu-ally fun. What makes it more fun is that you can actually make your own place names up and they integrate within the hierarchy as well. They don’t replace the official Google names, they add to them. For instance I have a place called “Home”. Home is ruffly a 25 mile radius place I created from where I live. I didn’t assign photos specifically to a point called “Home” I just created that place name and now any photos that fall inside that place from a coordinate standpoint show up in a search for Home or when I navigate to that place via the map.

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The way to create your own places is to right click at the center of the new place anywhere on the map and choose “new place” from the context menu. You will see the dialog that is illus-trated in figure 4. Inside that dialog you can move the center of the place around or drag it’s radius to be bigger or smaller. This is really a nice fea-ture. If you want to edit any of the properties or delete any of you custom place names, choose “Manage my places…” from the metadata menu. You will see a dialog like figure 5. Custom place name are again useful and a lot of fun. Again I would like to see some of this functionality integrated into other things that Ap-erture does like allow various IPTC fields to be populated based on a

template that you setup and associate with a custom place name. I can thing of about a thousand different uses for this. For now you will have to do that kind of thing yourself by batch modifying a bunch of images based on a place name search.

Flags And LabelsIf you came from any other image organizing or browsing software then you are probably familiar with flags and labels. If you didn’t they are simple enough. The primary function are both are quick ways to visually tag your im-ages. Why would you do this? The answer can be many reasons and can be as individual as you would like. If you are moving to Aperture from other image organizing solutions then you may already have a “system” in mind, that’s great bring it along with you. If you are just starting out then I will give you a few thoughts on both and the best way that I have found to use them along with some things that you may not already know about Aperture’s specific im-plementation of these visual notes.

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Labels

In my opinion color labels are best used consistently. This means that a particular color always means the same thing no matter what project or set of images you are looking at. If you use color labels extensively and don’t keep the same meaning for a particular color across all your images they quickly become meaningless and more confusing that not using them at all. This philosophy is pretty much built in to the way all software handles color labels. In Aperture the default “meaning” is nothing but the color.

If you open up Aperture’s preferences and go to the labels panel you can see what that the “meaning” text is simply the actual name for the color of the label as it shows up in various browser and viewer metadata overlays. You can type in any textual meaning that you like. On the other hand you can mirror what they mean for your team, another piece of software that you have used in the past, pretty much anything. The fact that there is only one set of textual meanings supported a any given moment should clue you into the fact that you are better off deciding on one mean-ing and sticking to it. Unless you have a team or organization that lives and dies by color labels and what they mean feel free to make them mean anything that is convenient to you. If you don’t know all of the possible things they might mean only use as many colors as you care to that help you quickly know things about a particular image and save the other colors for down the road.

In Adobe bridge they traditionally have had the meaning Select, Second, Approved, Review, and To Do… To me that seems a little off mixing some things together that are workflow with ratings type info but if it works for you that’s great. There you have labels they are easy to assign, easy to quickly identify, and can be used for searching and filter-ing all very quickly. I myself tend to use them for things other than work-flow or rating type information since I have started using Aperture I use albums to pretty much record every thing I do to what images and why I did it. I use stars exclusively as my ratings system and I don’t really like a whole lot of overlap.

The thing that you must know about color labels in Aperture is that they are only half way implemented. I was a little excited to see them because I planned on using them across application as a status communication mechanism. In Apple’s great wisdom, they decided to make color labels pretty much an Apple only thing. This is contrary to the way every single other image software developer does things. Aperture does not embed label info in exported files and does not record it back to the master when you apply IPTC to master files within Aperture. It exists only in Aper-ture’s database. Other applications embed a label number in an IPTC field that other software will read and display as the same color across applications from various developers since they all do it the same way. I don’t know what logic Apple had for this but it is not well thought through. You can tell because the one place a label does show up is in the finder for exported images. Even though this does work the textual meanings are independent for the finder and Aperture. This kind of thing is something typical of Microsoft. Let’s do the exact same thing but implement it differently so it’s useless across applications. Maybe next version we’ll see this re-thought.

Flags

Flags are the same kind of thing as labels, a quick visual indicator that you turn on and off by clicking the flag in the upper right corner of an image thumbnail. Like labels they are very quick to assign, can be seen visually, and they have a short cut to to set a flagged filter in every browser search box drop down. Unlike color labels, flags are best used for anything you need them to mean at that very moment. If you want to go through a couple of specific but unrelated albums for collecting a group of images together to print, you can flag them and then do a global search on flagged to show all the ones you selected. Of course you can use them for something “permanent” but I find that that doesn’t really work out that well over time. I rather use a custom field or a keyword instead. Keeping this in mind you may want to look for all of the flagged images in your library and un-flag them all after you are done using them

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for a particular reason. How long they can mean whatever you want them to mean is totally up to you. I actually love flags as a sort of quick notebook for images I want to see again for just about any reason. Like color labels this infor-mation is pretty much for use inside Aperture only.

I am sure you get it but I will walk through just one example of how I use flags. I have three daughters, let’s say I want to make one print of each of them for their grandmother. I go to the global Faces view, then look at all the pho-tos of each of my daughters in turn and flag one image. I then go to my all photos view and filter on the flagged im-ages. The three that show up are the ones I print. When I am done, I un-flag them all.

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Optimizing ApertureTreat Nothing As A Static Fixture

Part of the beauty and power of Aperture is it’s unique ability to be moulded to the task at hand. This ability is not meant to choose one way of doing something and then use it for the rest of eternity. Almost everything that Aperture can do and almost every way to change the way that Aperture looks has a shortcut key to do it for a reason. The rea-son is that so you can optimize the way Aperture works and the way it looks to best suit what you are doing right now. Each of it’s tools operate and interact with each other in ways that are sometimes intuitive and sometimes are not. To get the most out of Aperture and the efficiency that Aperture can offer you must think creatively about how to put it’s features together.

I mentioned before that all of the various containers that Aperture provides to group images together operate as al-bums. Everything works like an album, use them liberally, they are virtually free in terms of storage. Use them to keep track of everything you do. An upload to flicker, images exported to your Wordpress site, slideshows custom sort orders, portfolio ideas, everything that you ever selected or looked at at the same time. Why would you ever want to do it again? The same goes for smart albums and global library searches. Use them liberally and in creative ways. If you do a search make it a smart album, get rid of it if it is clogging up the works. Smart albums are free to, except when you click on them to see what is inside. If a smart album get’s you half 80% of the way there, select all of the images from the search and create a new album from the selection. Use the delete key to get rid of the ones that don’t belong.

Searches are amazing for discovering new or old things in strange ways or analyzing what piece of gear you should buy next by looking at the lenses you use and at what focal lengths, or what ISO you are shooting at. I am not talking about examining this image by image, I am suggesting using searches of various kinds, with lots of parameters. If you are liberal with your key words do a search for red and see what images come up. I happen to tag the dominant color of my images with a key word if there is a dominant color among other strange things. You would be surprised what comes up and how you may discover new ways to combine images or even ideas for a new project. Do searches on your metadata for focal length ranges to see what your favorite focal length is. If you use a zoom you might be surprised. Use it to figure out if you should buy a prime lens of a particular focal length. Use it to stretch yourself by shooting at a focal length you never use. Go nuts - its fun, and it is a good exercise to start using Aperture more crea-tively. Doing this kind of thing will make you think of new ways to use Aperture to suit your needs.

Customizing The User Interface

When people see me use Aperture they almost always stop me and say “how did you do that, cool”. They are usually referring to the way I change the interface on the fly with shortcut keys. If you are using Aperture the way that it came out of the box you are really missing out. Changing the Aperture user interface on the fly can really help, espe-cially on a laptop. Aperture can do a couple simple things in terms of modifying it’s user interface. The problem is that you find these customizations under a couple of different menus and it is a chore to go find them and select them, so most people just set it and forget it. Shortcut keys are a much better way of changing Aperture around. Learn a couple every week and use them religiously. You will be happy.

You can choose to display the inspector panel or not and what side it displays on. This is under the window menu and the other half is under the view menu. The short cut is the “I” key to turn it on or off and Shift-I to swap it left and right. Unless I am messing around with projects and albums or metadata I instinctively turn the inspector off using the “I” key and back on when I need it. Even on a big screen it makes a huge difference.C o p y r i g h t © 2 0 0 9 R o b e r t W B o y e r! A p e r t u r e 3 O r g a n i z a t i o n

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The other thing that Aperture can do is that it can rotate the position of the browser in relation to the image viewer.

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This is found in the View->Browser menu. Better yet, you can rotate the browser with the Shift-W shortcut. It might not seem like a big deal but once you commit a couple of simple things to your second nature it really makes working with Aperture much more pleasant than just about any other application I have ever used. It’s really great to be able

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to use every pixel of your display to suit the job at hand. If you are viewing or comparing images choose the best layout for the orientation of the images in question on the fly.

Less important is the ability to swap the browser top to bottom and left to right. This is the other interface choice un-der the View->Browser menu. The shortcut is Option-W. I group this and the ability to swap the inspector left to right as a matter of personal preference but even that makes using Aperture more pleasant. Last and certainly least you can turn the toolbar and the control bar on and off. The toolbar on/off switch is under the view menu or use Shift-T. The control bar is the one with the goofy ratings and arrow buttons on it and sometimes the keyword button sets. That switch is illogically under the window menu or just use the D key. The keyword button set display is Shift-D to tog-gle.

One last interface feature that I want to highlight is browser tabs and opening more than one browser at a time. You can open multiple browser tabs by using Command-click when selecting things from the project inspector. Each tab can contain whatever you command clicked on. So you can have 4 tabs with different projects and one tab displaying just one album inside a different project. Use your imagination but it can come in handy if you want to quickly switch between a couple of different albums that are located in a bunch of different projects that are not even close to each other in the inspector.

The way that you can open two browsers at once is by Option-clicking something in the project inpector. Again the browser can display anything, a project and an album from a completely different project, two different albums, whatever. This can come in handy when comparing two albums or constructing a new album from a couple of differ-ent sources if you want to be able to visually evaluate what is in the album while selecting other things that go into it.

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