I always import my images into my Library. This allows me to keep them backed up via Vaults and keeps things neat and organized. On import I rename images by adding a prefix to the filename. I don’t like changing the filename beyond this as I don’t really see a point to it.

I use 2 styles of prefixes:

• Camera Model with a letter suffix followed by an underscore: 40Da_, G10a_, SD700a_
  I added the letter suffix after I ‘flipped’ the counter on a previous camera and ended up with 2 350D_IMG_0001 images. The letter suffix prevents this
• For other people’s pictures (I keep track of my mother’s photos) I use first initial followed by last name and an underscore: JDoe_, AAdams_

On import I also add copyright info using a metadata preset. If possible I also add as much of my ‘essential metadata’ as possible.

I consider the following metadata to be essential:

• Sub-Location, City, State, Country (it is rare that I can’t get most of these filled!)
• Event (where appropriate)
• Credit and copyright info
• Caption and headline for anything that will get posted or put into a book

I’m data-paranoid. I will not apologize. I don’t erase a memory card until its images have been verified in Aperture and backed up into a Vault.

For my first pass through newly imported images, I will bulk add keywords if possible. I find it easy to select a series of photos and add keywords for easily visible attributes like people, pets, animals, and geographic features. I try to ensure that every image has at least one keyword associated with it, but try to avoid going image-by-image.

Not every image needs white balance correction, but when they do it is usually easy to correct one and Lift & Stamp the adjustment on subsequent shots.

My second pass is where I will rate images, fine-tune corrections, and keywords. If I am in a hurry to get photos posted to Flickr or Zenfolio, I will do a quick pass and only perform ratings.

As Aperture hides images rated as Rejected by default, I use that rating sparingly. That said, any image that is obvious junk will get a -1 rating. I still won’t delete the master, though. As I do my detailed pass I leave any unremarkable image unrated and give any image that I want to share in any capacity (Flickr, Zenfolio, book, or print) at least 1 star. Most only get that one star, but anything that I find to be particularly striking may get up to 4 stars here. Rarely do I give 4 stars anymore and 5 stars is reserved for my very best.

Any image rated as 1 star or more is a candidate for printing, inclusion in a book, or online posting. I use the excellent FlickrExport plugin and have a pro Flickr account. If you use Flickr, I would suggest that you do so as well. I’ll leave the details of Flickr up to you, but I do recommend embedding a visible watermark in any image you post online.

I am trying to get photos sold and am starting to get content posted to Zenfolio. I don’t have much more to say about this yet except that I really like the service so far.

I usually produce a couple of photo books through Aperture each year. The books usually come in 2 varieties: annual book and event book. I like the annual book idea as it gives us a photographic remembrance of a year. Given how many pictures I take, it is easy to fill a book each year.

An event book is usually actually a trip book that records our travels. Depending on the year I can generate a few of these. I have a customized book theme that I use as a starting point. Sometimes I’ll also do a book’s layout in Keynote.

Once I am done with my edits, publishing, and sharing I will offline my master images. I store my offline masters on a portable hard drive (I live off of a MacBook Pro so disk space is sometimes at a premium). This hard drive is backed up to a drive at my desk as well. Both drives hold Vaults of my Library.

For day-to-day shooting I create a Project for each month. It lives in a folder for each year and is named in the YYYY-MM format (the current Project is 2009-06). If there is a special event that gets lots of photos I will give it at least 1 Project and keep the naming scheme adding a 2-digit day if appropriate as well as the event’s name. I’ll then store those Projects as well as the month’s general Project in a Blue Folder named in the YYYY-MM format. I strive to keep my Projects at under 4GB in size including master images. That allows me to export a Project and burn it to DVD for safekeeping.

To give an example of what I’m talking about, here is what my Library would look like with a hypothetical road trip to Voyageurs National park:

• 2009-01
• 2009-02
• 2009-03
• 2009-04
• 2009-05
• 2009-06
• 2009-07
• 2009-07
• 2009-07-10 Outbound
• 2009-07-13 Ely
• 2009-07-14 Voyageurs
• 2009-07-16 Homebound
• …

I’m sure that I’ll update this as my workflow changes, but until then, that’s it.

A Keynote/Photo Book
iPhoto/Aperture books are great. I love photo books. I make a photo book for every big trip that we take. I’ve seen the discussions about improving the print quality of the books, but what I really wanted was a way to get better control of the layout of the iPhoto books.

I originally wrote this article about iPhoto, but the same applies to Aperture-created books. Although Aperture books are much more flexible than iPhoto books, you still can’t do a lot of things that you might want to do.

I should say here that what I’m about to outline is not for the faint of heart. Most people are probably quite happy with the available iPhoto book layouts. If you choose to follow my lead and head off of the beaten path you do so on your own.

iPhoto Book Layouts
The only thing that I don’t like about iPhoto books are their lack of layout options. Sure, each book style has several options for number of photos per page and many page designs have customizable text– but none of these layouts have the exact layout that I may want to best present a collection of images.

The Travel theme has some nice options, some with creative text options (I particularly like the option for 2 photos per page), but you’re still limited as to what you can do. Want more than 7 photos per page? Sorry. Want text with six pictures? Sorry again.

Enter Keynote
Eventually it occurred to me to try using a tool that I’m already intimately familiar with: Keynote. The new version of Keynote that is a part of Apple’s iWork is an extremely capable and flexible layout tool. You can choose the slide size to correspond nicely to the size of any of the book formats available through iPhoto. Just pick a book size (large hardcover is 11″ by 8.5″) and a target resolution (the iPhoto book default resolution appears to be 200dpi) and you’ve got your Keynote slide size (2200 x 1700 for my example).

You can use one of Keynote’s included themes or make your own. If you make your own (which I did) I would recommend delving deeply into the Keynote package to get some of those great backgrounds. Note that each of those .kth files is also a package so you’ll have to Control-Click them to view the package contents. Icon view with large icons can be helpful here. I copied every image that I liked into a new folder in ~/Pictures/

Take those backgrounds and set them as slide backgrounds. Use Inspector -> Slide Inspector -> Appearance -> Background (I had trouble finding this myself).
The great thing about Keynote is that you have nearly complete control over image layout and can use all of Mac OS X’s amazing typographic capabilities.

Speaking of amazing typographic controls, you can use Mac OS X glyphs as vector-based clipart. This means that you can scale and rotate to your heart’s content and don’t have to worry about jaggies.

So, with your pictures from iPhoto (remember the media browser is built into Keynote), some nice and free vector clipart, and a collection of nice backgrounds in hand you are all set to make your presentation/book.

Tying it Together
I’m not going to pretend to even suggest to you how you should lay out your presentation/book– so I’ll assume that you did your Keynote magic and are ready to convert from presentation to book. If you’ve made it this far, you’re done with the difficult part. Just choose File -> Export… and save your slides as TIFFs (or JPEGs if you’re drive space conscious).

Now you have a collection of pictures that you can import into iPhoto. Create a new iPhoto book based on your newly exported slides. Make sure you choose the same size book that you used for your math earlier. Personally, I like the Travel book. It’s actually my favorite book style from iPhoto. Choose a 1 picture layout and make it full page.

Buy Your Book
That wasn’t too bad, was it?

http://brettgrossphotography.com/2008/05/04/how-to-geocode-with-aperture-houdahgeo

Thanks Will!

Recently I saw a posting to the Apple-hosted Aperture discussion forums about Aperture Library cruft. Apparently the poster discovered that if you delete referenced images from your Library the Library doesn’t actually get smaller. He had (naturally) assumed that the thumbnail images would be deleted and that the Library would be smaller. Why wasn’t it?

I figured that Aperture was storing thumbnails somewhere in the Library so that is the best place to start looking.

Well, the Aperture Library ‘file’ is actually a special kind of Folder that Finder pretends is a file. If you Control-Click on the icon in Finder you can choose to Show Package Contents. Inside that folder are files and folders that exactly mirror your Aperture layout. The icons that represent your Projects are also file/folder packages and you can open them and you will see some interesting files in there.

There are some big files in there, an AP.Thumbnails and an AP.Minis file that combined take up about 100MB of disk space. Spread that out over several dozen projects and you’ll see where a lot of your disk space is going. Apparently Aperture stores all of a Project’s thumbnails in a single (large) file and doesn’t trim that file down when an image is deleted. I don’t delete many images, but I do occasionally move a lot of images between Projects. I wondered if my Library was unnecessarily large.

I wonder what would happen if I deleted those .Thumbnails files, .Minis, and .Tinies files files?

Would Aperture properly regenerate them?

Well, the short answer is yes it will and everything seems to be OK.

My Library with very few Managed Masters and about 400 images with hi-res previews weighed in at 22.63GB. I deleted all of the .Thumbnails files, .Minis, and .Tinies files in my Library.

I launched Aperture and made sure to get it to rebuild all of the thumbnails (All Photos and scroll with the L key). A few hours later my Library was… wait for it… a little longer… 17.92GB.

I saved 4.7GB of space by making Aperture rebuild its thumbnail files.

I use a MacBook Pro. 4.7GB is not an inconsiderable amount of space.

What do you think?

Before
================================================================
Total Library size (Get Info): 22.63 GB (24,031,246,819 bytes)
Library.apdb (Get Info): 314.6 MB (329,904,128 bytes)

Totals
----------------------------------------------------
AP.Thumbnails : 17,225,880 KB
AP.Minis      : 3,611,828 KB
AP.Tinies     : 57,860 KB
JPEGs         : 237,672 KB
			  : 218,052 KB
** why 2 totals? **

Deleted Thumbnails, Minies, Tinies
================================================================
Total Library size (Get Info): 2.7GB (2,634,581,366 bytes)

After
================================================================
Total Library size (Get Info): 17.92 GB (18,973,454,530 bytes)
Library.apdb (Get Info): 314.7 MB (329,949,184 bytes)

AP.Thumbnails : 13,035,704 KB
AP.Minis      : 2,769,576 KB
AP.Tinies     : 45,116 KB
JPEGs	      : 237,672 KB
              : 218,052 KB

Notes
================================================================
Calculate size of all files of given extension
	find . -name "*.AVI" -print0 | xargs -0 du -ch

http://wrecking.org/cbd/2007/11/16/unixtrix-calculate-size-of-all-files-of-given-extension/

Delete all files with a given suffix
	find . -name "*.Thumbnails" -delete

Technorati Tags: Aperture, Apple

I use HoudahGeo to geocode my images. HoudahGeo is a great and efficient application that allows you to assign GPS coordinates to images based on aligning an image’s timestamp to a GPS tracklog or to a GPS waypoint. Getting the GPS waypoint or tracklog is easy if you have a GPS that you can connect to your Mac (which, of course, I do). I’ve got a lot of waypoints saved up and will be busy integrating them into my master images over the next while, but that’s for later.

For now I’ll show you how easy it is to geocode an image when you’ve got a waypoint ready to use:

Step 1- find your image. Here I have an image taken near home and I’m showing the pertinent locational metadata.

Step 2- Run HoudahGeo and set your position. It is much simpler using a waypoint than a track, but tracklog-based positioning works great, too.

Be sure to tell HoudahGeo to write the GPS locational data into your master image’s EXIF metadata.

Step 3- Tell Aperture to update the EXIF metadata: Metadata menu > Update EXIF from Master

Step 4- Verify that the metadata got updated properly

Step 5- View your image on the map: Metadata menu > Show on Map…

Step 6- Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: Aperture, Geocode, GPS

Wicked cool!

No sample script yet, but I wanted to shout out this great new feature-

This is an update to the previous update and should work properly now.

This AppleScript will make Aperture’s virtual keywords real.

“Huh?”

If you make hierarchal keywords in Aperture (you are, aren’t you), parent keywords are not exported with masters when exporting with XMP nor are they exported when exporting images as other formats. You can, however, use those keywords to find your images. Thus if you tag an image with ‘Bald Eagle’ in the following keyword hierarchy:

Animal
–> Wildlife
—-> Bird
——>Eagle
——–>Bald Eagle

You can find your image by searching for ‘Bird’, but when you export that same image the term ‘Bird’ is nowhere to be found.

FWIW, IMHO this is something that should have a checkbox in the Export panel.

Make Hierarchal Keywords Real 03.scpt.zip

Technorati Tags: Aperture, AppleScript

John Larson posted some quick sample AppleScripts to his site. While there, you should also probably just subscribe to his blog to make sure you get any updates.

I can’t get reveal to work for me, but I dig duplicate. Now I can make my own Albums via AppleScript. You can’t remove an image from an Album once it’s in there, but I’m excited about being able to add images to Albums.

This script is more a big stub. It’ll give you the paths for the currently selected images’ masters. It uses 2 methods for finding the master depending on whether the master is managed or referenced. I am sure that I can speed up the managed master finding by moving from the Unix find command to querying the database, but that’ll have to wait.

Get Path to Master 04.scpt.zip

Here is a tip that I’d like to pass along about using your own Aperture books as themes.


Aperture 2 book layout

As you are doing your book layout, you will likely come up with new layouts- I know that I do. Maybe you want a page to show 3 tall, skinny images with caption metadata boxes below each or one that has 2 very wide panoramic images with shooting information between them. Once you create your new page layout that you like, be sure to save it into the book: hit the Action menu (the gear) and choose Save Page -> As New Document Master. Give you page a good and descriptive name (like “3 – Vert – Caption”). And considermaking pages that are mirror images of each other for a much more professional feel.

Once you’re done with your book, duplicate it into your next Project (or a utility Project), remove the images from it and you’re ready to roll. I keep a utility Project handy to keep my current book templates which makes them very portable and sharable.

Now if only I could decide on that next lens purchase…