As I mentioned, Aperture stores its information in this file. All of your images’ metadata and edits are stored in there. They’re small, though and most of the size is the database file that Aperture uses to quickly access the info stored in those files as well as thumbnail images and high-resolution previews.

This is a very important file to back up and Apple made it easy to do so. The built-in Vaults feature allows you to keep multiple copies of your Library stored on various hard drives in the event that lose your Library file itself. Synchronizing the Vaults with the master Library is a manual task so remember to do it frequently!

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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:

1. Folders do not contain images. Images live in Projects and Albums have pointers to images.
2. 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!