Aperture 3 Organization

R B D E S I G N
Photography | Design | Consulting
APERTURE 3 ORGANIZATION
A g u id e t o A p p le A p e r t u re ’s e x t e n s iv e org an izat ion al fe at u re s .
ROBERT W BOYER
North East Md Usa
213.674.4450
w w w. r w b o y e r. c o m
Introduction
Aperture 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.
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! Aperture 3 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
Note regarding the delete key: By itself the delete key
only reason that you can see it in Album #1 is that you created it
just removes a version from the current album type
there. If I highlight the new version in Album #1 and hit the
object. Command-delete actually removes a version
delete key you can’t see it in Album #1 any more but it still ex-
from the library so it will not show up anywhere any
ists in the project. I know this was a lot of tedious blah blah blah
more. If it happens to be the last version the master
about versions but it is absolutely essential to understand that
will go along with it.
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- Drop targets are important. When I am talking about
other project Aperture moves the master and all of the ver- dragging images into a project you must specifically
sions associated with that master into the target project. If you use the actual yellow project box as the drop target. If
do this by accident don’t panic undo works fine, everything in you use any other drop target inside of a project like
the project stays the same anyway, you can drag them back an album, the images are not moved or copied, they
the same way. If you have a project with a bunch of albums, are merely added to that album.
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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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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Projects
Project 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
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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 If you spend the time to create a custom sort order
out of albums. Albums are practically free in terms of storage within an album and need to use it again for some-
space and are so useful in so many different ways. They are part thing else that may require new versions don’t wast
and parcel to my everyday workflow. I create albums constantly time completely resorting the images. Use duplicate
to track just about everything. Images I have post-processed, album instead of “new from selection”. This will re-
images I export to different places for display on the web, im- tain your custom sort order.
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
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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 If you spend the time to create a custom sort order
Aperture feature including within a plain old browser view of a within an album and need to use it again for some-
project as well but if you are going to sort images a specific way thing else that may require new versions don’t wast
why not use an album to keep track of that sorting work and time completely resorting the images. Use duplicate
why you did it. Need a different ordering? Duplicate the album album instead of “new from selection”. This will re-
and sort away. Want to try your slide shows a couple of different tain your custom sort order.
orders. Keep them all, get rid of the ones you don’t like. Custom
image sequences in slide shows are extremely important . Slide
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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.
There are two types of slideshows in Aperture 3. The
Custom image sequences are not just for slide shows, use your
first kind is “on the fly” it works on any selection of
imagination. If you don’t have an imagination, here is another
images via the File->Play Slideshow menu. The sec-
ond kind you create specifically using the New- example of how I happen to use albums and custom sorting of
images. There are a million different ways that I need to export
>Slideshow menu. They are very different things. I
my images depending on what I am doing, what services I’m
use them both.
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
Make sure you set Aperture 3 to automatically stack stack shows up in can have a different album pick. Try it your-
new versions in Aperture 3 preferences. The setting is self so that you can really wrap your head around this because it
under the general preferences tab. 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.
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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.
11
3. Go into full screen mode, Turn on stack mode. Take about There are numerous different viewer/browser modes
10 minutes to go through hundreds of images using key- within Aperture accessed through the View->Main
board shortcuts and make my stack picks so the best of the viewer menu. Show multiple is the most commonly
bunch show up at the top of each stack. Change to “view used but I find both stack mode and compare mode
multiple”, in other words turn off stack mode. very productive. Try them out and see what they do.
You will use them more effectively if you learn the
4. Close all of the stacks in the viewer.
shortcut keys
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.
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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- You can create new projects via a template in Aper-
brary (more on this a little later we discuss folders). You can see ture 3. I find that this is most useful for creating a
an example on the left. These typically are looking for keywords series of smart albums that I always have inside cer-
and a rating. A lot of you may argue that I could have used tain kinds of projects. You can do this by right click-
smart albums for some of the albums that I talked about in the ing on a project and choosing duplicate project struc-
last section and you would be right. It’s a matter of personal ture. I find it helps to keep empty projects with only
preference in most cases and speed, ease, and productivity in the items I want to use as a template.
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
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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.
14
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
There is one nasty surprise with stack behavior when ever open stacks on purpose after the initial steps in my work-
they are closed. If you want to delete only the version flow. When I do open a stack it is almost always an individual
that is on the top of the stack then you must select all stack and not all of the stacks in a view. The fact that you can
with the stacks closed, open all the stacks, then delete open a stack and see all of the various versions associated with
the versions otherwise you will delete all the versions each other is very useful. With one click or key I can see every
in the stack.. 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
15
pick so you would have to go into that album and make each If you have an album containing lift and stamped
black and white version the album pick manually. A far better cropped versions if you select the crop tool from the
way is to select all of the black and white versions and use the toolbar you will be able to see the crop and use the
“new album” menu or shortcut. When you do this all of the mouse to move or adjust it as you arrow through each
selected version are automatically made the album pick in the image. Just move to the next image instead of hitting
new album. Heck you can even use the search HUD to filter all enter or otherwise closing the crop tool. This way you
of the versions that have black and white adjustments. save a bunch of wasted motion reselecting the tool for
each image
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

The “Z” key is a far better and quicker tool to use to
similar shots together. I cannot emphasize enough how valuable
evaluate the detail of two images than the loupe tool
this is for me. You can use auto-stack any time after import via
while in stack or compare mode. It will simultane-
ously zoom both images to 100% and allow you to the stack menu. Auto-stack works by looking at the image cap-
ture date and time. Assuming you are using a digital camera the
scroll both of them at the same time by holding down
capture date is recorded with 1/100 of a second resolution. Us-
shift - space and using the mouse.
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.
16
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
17
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- All of the ratings that I use mean something to my
lar stuff with no rating. By doing this in this order every varia- workflow. Trying to come up with a rating system
tion that I have of the same master will also have 5 stars but that somehow rates images comparatively across your
versions that I do not use will have none. This cuts down on entire library and across every photo endeavor is a
search noise - if I want to see the variations that I actually shot it waste of time. If you have a way great if not I would
is usually for a very specific image - not any thing I want to see advise that you only thing about ratings for the pro-
a bunch of them for. All of the versions that I create from this ject at hand. For my purposes ratings of 1 to 3 cannot
point on will most likely also get some additional metadata tags be compared across projects let alone genres. Ratings
that tell me exactly why they exist. A lot of them are standard of 4 or 5 have a global meaning, at least within a
for me, some of them are there by default like “PSD” in the file genre.
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
18
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.
If you select multiple images and want to do anything
To deal with this make the new album for all of your Photoshop
to all of them the general rule is that short-cut keys
edited images as you would for any other workflow related
and menus will affect all the images in the selection.
album. Do all of your Photoshop dirty work. In that album do a
The HUD’s and inspectors will only affect the pri-
search for file names with PSD, select them all. Then instead of
mary selection - the one with the thick white border.
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
19
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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Folders
Way 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
21
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
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Faces
Getting 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
24
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
25
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
26
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.
27
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-
28
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
29
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.
Places
Getting 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
30
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
31
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
32
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.
33
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 Labels

If 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
35
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 Aperture
Treat 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.
37
The other thing that Aperture can do is that it can rotate the position of the browser in relation to the image viewer.
38
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
39
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.
40

Aperture 3 Organization

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R B D E S I G N

Photography | Design | Consulting

In Album #1 I am going to bring up the adjustment HUD and

In yet more words a version can show up in 20 places, that

Some practical notes on masters and versions

Thoughts on project organization

Using multiple computers

Examples of what you can do with this functionality are:

Albums and Stacks

Albums, Album Picks, and Workflow Sequence

I mentioned that the first thing I do is use auto-stack to put

Album Pick Quirks

Stack Mode and Compare Mode

Folders Within A Project

An example would be something that has already shown up on

mode” to do anything but faces stuff.

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

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

Making Use Of Faces

The built in functionality to use the Faces

The only thing that seems to be automated

Associating Location Data With Your Images

The second way to associate location in-

After importing you will see the track show

Just a couple of notes if you do use a hand-

Flags And Labels

Customizing The User Interface

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