Once the images are in Aperture you can use Aperture’s file management tools to reorganize them by date, Project, or whatever.

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.