Getting Started with Aperture – Organizing – Part 1
Congratulations! You’ve made the move into the world of non-destructive, non-disk-space-hogging digital photography. If you’re reading this then you’ve hopefully already seen how great Aperture’s use of non-destructive editing is, and its non-disk-space-hogging versioning alone is worth the price of admission.
But I digress. We’re here to talk about organizing your Aperture Library and I should get on to that…
Let’s start at the beginning: every image that Aperture knows about is in the single Aperture Library. It is the icon at the top of your Projects pane. Despite the fact that nothing happens when you click on it, all of your pictures are in there. If you expand it you will see some built-in Smart Albums that show you your images grouped by certain criteria.
Think of the Library like a filing cabinet. While everything is in there, it isn’t stored directly in it. For that you use Aperture’s main form of organization: the Project. Think of Projects as boxes for your actual photos. It is where the actual photo lives. You can have as many Projects as you want and can have up to 10,000 images into a single Project. That’s a lot of pictures but I recommend keeping fewer images in each project for reasons that I will get into later.
Images live in 1 and only 1 Project. If you import the same image multiple times into multiple Projects then you will end up with what Aperture will treat as different Master images. Don’t do it unless you really, really know what you are doing and why you are doing it.
The next level of organizing images is the Album. Albums come in a few flavors, but I’m going to focus on the regular, plain blue Album. Albums are very similar to real, physical albums. You can stick images into them – even images from different Projects. This does not affect the original which continues to live in only 1 Project. The Album only has a pointer to the image (which keeps disk usage to a minimum). Albums can live inside of Projects or on their own directly in the Library.
If it helps (and I am not stretching my analogy too far) think of the Library as a filing cabinet, Projects as boxes of images, and Albums as… well albums. They can be loose in the filing cabinet or organized into the Project boxes.
Our analogy definitely breaks when I start talking about Folders. Folders in Aperture behave very similarly to Folders in the Finder: you stick stuff into them. Two very important points about Folders:
- Folders do not contain images. Images live in Projects and Albums have pointers to images.
- Folders come in 2 types: Blue and Yellow. Essentially, a Blue Folder is a Folder that isn’t in a Project and a Yellow Folder is a Folder that is in a Project.
You can organize multiple Projects into a single Blue Folder and organize multiple Albums inside of a Yellow Folder in a Project.
Now that we have all of that out of the way, we can start about organizing your images.
I highly recommend keeping your Projects sized to fit onto an optical disc. If you have a DL DVD drive then that means about 9GB, if you have a BluRay drive you suck, and if you have a regular DVD drive then you should try to keep to about 4.5GB. I wrote an AppleScript that I use to audit the sizes of my Projects. You can easily archive a snapshot of your Projects simply by dragging them out of Aperture to the Finder- then you can burn them to disc. Do this and do this regularly.
I have found it easiest to organize by year. I have a Blue Folder for each year and then a series of Projects corresponding to months, events or whatever. I name my Projects using the YYYY-MM format with a descriptive name following such as ’2007-10 WV Cabin Weekend’. That way all of my Projects are sorted when I open the Blue Folder. One great thing about Blue Folders is that when you select one you can see all of the images in all of the Projects that Folder contains. I’ve been on several excursions where I’ve shot more than 1 DVD’s worth of images and I handle this by making another Blue Folder with multiple Projects inside:
That’s all for now. Until next time, happy shooting!
This post has 9 comments
March 29th, 2009
Brett,
I’m looking forward to using that Applescript for monitoring project sizes — great advice on backup strategies with projects.
I’m wondering whether you could spare a bit more advice on how to organize. I know do it by year, but I’m struggling with how to manage workflow (playflow, I guess, since I don’t make any money). When I import card contents I might have 20 family photos, 5 cat photos, and 30 work-related (plant) photogs — and I would like to file them in different spots. I don’t really understand how to do this efficiently. Part of my frustration is that I can’t simply drag imported images into one of 3 or more folders from the initial “Import Folder”. I can do it, but the originals are still in the Import Folder’s Project. I wish that Aperture would migrate the image’s project location automatically.
Am I missing something basic? Thanks for any advice, if you have a moment someday.
April 1st, 2009
I’d be happy to discuss organizational options with you.
Aperture’s organizational features can be a bit to wrap your mind around at first. This is the one aspect that seems to cause the most difficulties to the most people.
Folders don’t hold photos they hold Projects, Albums, and other Folders.
Projects are where photos actually reside.
Albums essentially contain references to photos that can be from any Project.
If you place multiple Projects into a Folder, you can see every photo in every Project by selecting the Folder. This is a powerful feature as it allows you to do some arbitrary organization but still have multiple source Projects available together.
So… when you do an import, you import your photos into a Project. If you want your photos to be in a different Project you can move them to another Project. If you put them into an Album, you aren’t actually moving them at all, you are just putting a reference to them into the Album.
What I would recommend is using Smart Albums. You can import your images into a Project of your choice (I use one per month) and automatically have the photos be filed into your Smart Albums simply by adding useful metadata to them.
Lets say that you have several cats, several family members, and take photos of different kinds of plants. You can set up your Keyword hierarchy to look like this:
Plants
Poison Ivy
Skunk Cabbage
Dandelions
Cats
Fluffy
Mittens
Family
Me
Mom
Dad
Cousin Sue
If you set your Smart Album’s criteria to be ‘Keywords contains Cats’ then any image you tag with Fluffy will appear because it automatically inherits the Cat Keyword.
As long as you keyword your images they’ll stay organized for you.
Let me know what you think.
August 7th, 2009
How about ask you for free discourse once again!
1. I stumbled upon your website today. Found it quite useful. Still have to get my arms around your keywords scripts.
2. Meanwhile a question – i currently import images into a “@process” project. Then I tag, rate and move images or delete. Say I move the images into a project say YYYY-MM-project1, ad that project is contained in folder YYYY. Upon moving the image into that new project, I would ideally like to move the image into the folder Pictures>YYYY>YYYY-MM-project1. If the folder is there, just move the image. If the folder does not exist, then the folder should be created. Any ideas if such a script exists or pointers? The reason I want to do this, is that way even the images on my hard disk are aligned in a systematic manner.
August 7th, 2009
I’m glad that you’ve found the site useful!
There is no automated way to move image files. The Relocate Master command under the File menu allows for very flexible filing methods, but you can’t get to it via AppleScript.
You can set up a custom Subfolder Format when you have the Relocate Master window open. This can contain variables such as image year, image month, and Project. If you always file your images the same way, you can just select everything and choose Relocate Master, choose your Subfolder Format and Aperture will file things for you.
It isn’t automated, but it isn’t too inconvenient.
August 8th, 2009
this little tip of using “project name” as folder name is great. i was not thinking about it.
and i can make it even faster by pressing cmd-shift-/ and type “relo…”.
so all good for now. on this front at least.
thanks!
August 9th, 2009
Hello,
I also found your site today. I’ve opened Aperture for the first time, I’m use to saving all my photos to a hard drive in folders by year and then topic. When importing to Aperture are all the photos saved in a single file? If so what happens 20 years from now when that files is no longer recognized by a program? Or, can I save the photos to my folder setup I’ve used forever and have Aperture point to them?
This may be a little off topic, sorry.
Mike
August 21st, 2009
If you choose to save your Aperture photos in the Aperture Library then they are kept safe for you inside of a special kind of folder that looks in the Finder like a single file. That keeps you from accidentally causing problems for Aperture by moving or deleting something that it needs. If, for some reason, Aperture ceases to exist or you recover your Library from a backup 20 years from now you will be able to retrieve all of your masters from inside this folder. In fact, you will even be able to recover all of your custom metadata from the various XML files stored with your master images.
You are certainly still free to have Aperture store your masters ‘in the open’ on your hard drive using your own custom filing method.
The big benefits to using the Library are that the masters get backed up if you use Vaults and the master images are kept safe from accidental deletion or modification.
April 6th, 2010
I have thousands of photos arranged, or not, in many folders and subfolders. The folder titles are sometimes useful, sometimes not. I am considering starting anew with aperture and just dumping all files into one folder, as the subfolders seem to be a barrier to a quick import. I don’t want this to take more than 4 hours. Any suggestions?
April 9th, 2010
Personally, I’d recommend keeping your folder structure for your initial import. It won’t slow down your import and will (possibly!) add valuable info to the pictures. Every folder will be imported as an Aperture Album which may help in tagging.
Once the images are in Aperture you can use Aperture’s file management tools to reorganize them by date, Project, or whatever.
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