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How Do You Organize Your Aperture?
One of the most common questions I hear Aperture users asking is "how should I organize my library?" At first Aperture seems pretty straight forward as far as organization goes. You create Projects which contain the images from a single shoot, and then you can create Albums, Web Galleries, and Light Tables below each project as you wish. You can use Queries to create Smart Albums within your Projects and so on and so forth.
Well, this all works just fine until you have amassed a few hundred Projects or more. And, if you are one of those photographers out there who is adopting Aperture midstream in your digital lifespan, you probably already have a pile of "Projects" waiting to be imported.
So, I have talked with numerous Aperture users and everyone seems to have a different way of managing their Library. Some prefer to keep things simple and just create a running list of Projects. They tell me things like "it is so easy to just scroll down the list and find the project you are looking for alphabetically." Okay, well that works just fine if you always name your projects with some consistency.
Then there are the photographers who opt for the chronological approach. By using a hierarchy of "blue" folders these photographers arrange their Projects according to the date they were shot. Seems pretty simple, but finding projects based on your memory of when it was shot can be pretty tough, especially if you shoot a few times a week throughout the year. "What year did I go on that trip to Peru again?"
The truth is, Aperture allows you, the user, to organize your images just about any way you wish, with a few caveats. The main caveat being that an image must reside in a single Project. You can move images from Project to Project at any time, but a single image can never reside in more than one project.
So, I thought I would share a few tips that I find useful for organizing an extensive Aperture library. Of course, these are just tips and suggestions, so please don't forget that each Aperture user (including yourself) will have a somewhat different approach to organization that works better.
Tip Number 1 - Use Favorites
At the top of the Projects pane you will see a few drop down menus. One of them says "All Projects" and the two on the right look like a plus sign and a star shape. You can mark any Project as a favorite. Just click the star shape drop down and click "Add to Favorites." Whenever you want to view your favorite projects simply click the All Projects drop down and click Show Favorites. You can mark Albums, Smart Albums and everything else that you can see in the Projects pane as a favorite, and it's a pretty handy way to filter your projects.
Tip Number 2 - Use Folders
Aperture offers the ability to organize your projects within folders. At first folders can seems a little strange in Aperture. Sometimes they are blue, sometimes they are sort of yellow. Well, it is pretty simple. If your folder exists at the top level above any projects, it will be blue, and in fact is an actual folder inside the Aperture library file. If the folder is beneath a Project in the hierarchy it will be yellow. So, blue folders can contain multiple projects, and yellow folders are folders within a single project.
Tip Number 3 - Use Albums and Smart Albums
Albums are a great way to add a more complex level of organization to your projects pane. Unlike Aperture's Projects, Albums can contain images from any project, regardless of where they reside in the hierarchy. And, an album can even reside at the top level, outside the scope of a Project. So, albums offer a great way to group images from multiple projects together, or to separate images from within a project into subgroups. Lets say for instance you have shot five basketball games for your home team over the past few weeks. You probably imported each game as a separate project. Within each project you can create an album for your selects, and then, later, you could create a top level album containing a tighter edit from those selects spanning all five games for a portfolio. You could also do this with Smart Albums, they work the same way in the hierarchy, only they use a query to fill themselves with images.
Tip Number 4 - Use Folders To Organize Albums
One thing you might notice if you begin to create top level Albums or Smart Albums is that they get thrown into the list of projects alphabetically. If this seems to disorganized for you, simply make a top level blue folder and move your Albums or Smart Albums inside. Following the above basketball example you could make a blue folder at the top of the hierarchy called Best Basketball Shots. Within this folder you could have multiple albums or smart albums drawing on images from your entire catalog. You could even create a smart album that is a query search of this blue folder and contains only the 5 star images. The possibilities are pretty much endless!
Tip Number 5 - Decide What a Project Means to You
My final word of advice would be to decide what a Project means to you. For many a Project is probably a "shoot." But, a Project can be just about anything. So be sure to come up with some type of standard. Some people prefer to think of a Project as "everything I shot in 2004." Within the Project 2004 they might have numerous albums for each month. This is fine, but just remember the one rule in Aperture that is a Project can contain no more than 10,000 images. If you plan to take more than 10,000 images in a year, this approach might not work for you. Also, it pays to keep Projects fairly small in size as they can be easily exported and transfered to other Aperture libraries. Personally, I like to think of a Project as a shoot or an assignment. Sometimes an assignment will span multiple days and consist of a long list of "shoots." At some point I have to decide if I want to organize the entire assignment as a single project, or perhaps as numerous projects within a single top level blue folder.
Luckily, Aperture is pretty flexible, I can always change my mind later, and reorganize things as I wish. I am always interested to hear how others organize their libraries, so please reply in the comments section.
hmm, interesting. I have always tried to keep the projects pane as clean as possible. I will generally group projects by the place/activity. If something take a week long then I will use blue folders the organize it.
Also I like to have smart albums for my ratings, cameras and All Photos. I use spaces to keep the all shots smart album right below the Library one (which I dont like because of all the different preset albums it has that I never use - and when open just wastes space) For instance my Rejects Album would look like this " Rejects" It has 4 spaces before the R to keep is right below the All Shots, but above the smart folders for 30D and LX1, which have 3 spaces.
Glad you addressed this. I'm still trying to figure out the 'best' way as I add more and more images to Aperture (25k and growing...)
Currently using:
(Folder)2007
..(Folder)July
....(Project)20070724
....(Project)20070725
and then putting smart folders one level above the year folders to organize particular subject by keywords.
Sometimes I'll make notes on the individual day project
ie: Project-20070725-Gpa in park
Advantages seem to be that the projects stay nice and small, and it uses Apertures strengths in keywording to organize longer term project using smart folders.But it is still taking some getting used to moving away from the previous structure of organizing the project by subject.
I'm VERY curious how others are dealing with this.
Quite the interesting article. For my own usage, I make Projects for each season, e.g., Summer 2007, Spring 2007, Winter 2006, etc. Inside each season, I'll have Albums for special events or individual shoots, and I have a Smart Album at the top for all my 4-star and above selects. That's the deal for most photos I shoot. For bigger shoots, I make a Project for them, like weddings or sporting events. Every photo gets batch keyworded, and the selects get captioned and titled, and most likely end up getting exported to Flickr/Facebook.
It works for me, and I like the system. I'd like to see how everyone else organizes their shots.
This is a great topic that I have never really seen addressed in detail. More concret examples of how libraries are organized would be very useful! I organize mine first by category of shoot using folders: advertising, corporate, editorial, personal work. Then I divide each category into clients using folders and projects (for advertising I would have folder names like, Nike, HSBC, Visa, Ford, etc.) (Folders for clients with more than one shoot and projects for a client for whom I have only shot once.)
Client folders are divided into job names that describe the shoot. I will use albums to divide a project into different sections or parts of a shoot.
Looking forward to seeing more posts and methods of organizing libraries!
I am an amatuer who is starting to outgrow iPhoto. I just ordered a new MBPro with aperture installed. My first step was to migrate my existing structure to Aperture. I guess I view a project as a shoot, although in my head I think of "roll" instead of "shoot". Once I have moved everything I can start breaking some of my old rolls into separate shoots (something I could not do with iPhoto). Sometimes I would have unrelated pictures piled up in a single roll and I could not break them apart. I guess now I will be able to separate them. I plan on having top folders for years and projects(shoots, rolls) underneath that. The other possiblity is having folders on top of the year for owner... When my father comes and visits he shoots tons of pictures of my babies (its a grandparent thing). So withing a few weeks he will produce hundreds of pictures and inevitably I fall behing tagging all of those pictures and it takes me months to get back into my normal workflow. (tag, rate, ship to flickr, print book at the end of the year) I would like to sort of banish his pictures (or some of my friends) to a separate top level folder. Would it even make sense to push these pictures to a different library altogether? can you view two libraries at the same time? can you move pictures back and forth between libraries?? ARGHHH I have so much to learn yet!
Jose,
Joe Schorr has a great tutorial on how to migrate from iPhoto to Aperture. Check it out on the Apple Training Seminars. They are free, but you have to register. Just follow this link: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/digitalmedia/2007/06/01/iphoto-to-aperture.html
As for libraries, you can only view one library file at a time, but it is very easy to push whole Projects from one library to the other. just drag the Project to your desktop, or use the Export Projects function in the File menu, and then drag in or import the project into the new library. Using a blue folder to separate your feather's pics would be a great way of handling this on a single library, however....
-micah
See now THIS is the kind of topic this blog is famous for!
As a commercial shooter, Projects tend to be shoot specific Clients with severals project running simultaneously get a blue folder. Projects like Annual reports are contained within one project file and are sorted by smart Albums.
When a project is done, billed and paid for, I export it to external storage and the remove it from my library.
The idea of 'Projects' was confusing when I first moved to Aperture, since iPhoto just stuck all my photos in one giant container. So, initially, I created a Project named 'All Images' and dumped everything in there.
Which was slow and sluggish to search (several thousand images in one Project). Today, I have a pretty simple yet effective file structure to keep things organized, though not bloated:
All Projects [Folder]
..2004 [Folder]
....03 March [Project]
.......(2006-03-04) Barcelona [Album]
.......(2006-03-23) Rome [Album]
Basically, Projects are months and, within these, I have albums for specific events like travel, live music, parties, events, etc etc. The only real problem I find with this, is trips that span over 2 different months (ie, Hong Kong trip - from late July to early August). But I just stick the July photos in the July Projects, and the same with the August ones.
Oh, and I reaaaaly dislike how Aperture doesn't allow me to manually arrange my albums :}
Great stuff, i am about to reorganize my "library", and it really helps to hear what other ppl are doing. And how about referenced files or aperture library file? thoughts? ideas?
Thanks for the article. I have been struggling for a while to find the best way to organize my photos in Aperture. I also upload a lot of images to Flickr with FlickrExport which is amazing because it assigns the Flickr ID to the image in Aperture so if later on you add more keywords, make adjustments you can re-upload it and it will be replaced on your Flickr keeping all the comments, favorites, etc...
Regarding the organization, for now I am using top level folders as "collections" and then "projects" and inside projects albums and smart albums. I am calling "folders" things like "Party & Celebration", "Places", "Randomness", "Travel" and so on... a quick example:
Travel (Folder/Blue)
• Austin - January 2008 (Projects)
• Israel - June 2008 (Projects)
• The Ocean (Album)
• Jessica (Album)
• Brasil - August 2007 (Projects)
That is basically how I am doing now. Still a lot to do. I have over 30K photos and growing...
I am a new MAC/aperture user trying to migrate from Kodak Easy Share. Everything is so different on a MAC!
I first transferred everything from the PC to an external drive to the MAC.
Q1 - are the JPG photos automatically now reduced in quality with this transfer? What can I do different in getting the pics off my old PC to avoid this
I did try Iphoto - importing everything from the already transferred in files - but dont like it as it doesn't allow any type of grouping/organizing that I can see, so now I'm trying out Aperture.
Q2 - are the photos being saved twice to the hard drive if I first transferred them as described above to my chosen directory (using finder) and then importing into Aperture (or iphoto or kodak)? With RAW images in particular, seems like the drive might get filled up pretty quickly.
I have 12K pictures or so and have always organized chronologically such as with 2008 (2008 -1January, 2008 -2February, etc. which forced the months to stay in chronological order). Now I want to pull certain higher quality ones out and organize by generic category and subcategory (nature/animals/bird or travel/Italy/Rome, etc. These are the pictures I want to upload to fotolia and other sites...and I suppose I should have a reject folder as well.
Q3 - Some of the above ideas and tips on organizing within aperture seem on point, but if anyone has any specific ideas on how to accomplish this within aperture, please advise.
Q4 - is there any way to add a picture to the beginning of a project instead of always to the end of the project - to avoid so much scrolling?
Q5 - for sharing family photos I have always used Kodak Gallery. I see Flicker mentioned alot. Is this better?
Thanks!
B Clark
Thanks for the great info!
Thanks all. Great reading for this slightly haphazard photographer.
I am organizing my files in finder folders this way:
folder - [year]
subfolder - [year_## eventname]
filename - [eventname_year_###]
Eg:
2009
2009_01 winter
winter_2010_001
winter_2010_002
etc.
2009_02 wedding carlo
etc..
This works great and also imports logically into iPhoto.
Because events are prefixed by the year and sequencenumber.
Now I have Aperture installed and have to figure out how to organize it there.
I am thinking of:
* Blue folders for the main folders [year]
* Projects will be the subfolders [eventname]
* And the photo names can stay unchanged.
Does that makes sense?
Great thread ...
I'm trying to set up my library now. The setup I'm using is:
(Folder) Personal
... (Folder) 2010
...... (Project)101123 Project Name
This works for me, except if you 'Keep Arranged By Name' it doesn't allow you to have the most recent projects (in this case, the highest numbers) at the top. If Apple could fix this, I'd be perfectly happy with my current setup!
Another thought would be if they could make 'Smart Folders'. If I could set a Smart Folder to automatically include all projects taken in a particular month, that would solve all my problems!
I started by putting all our photos in different folders per subject and time folders like:
Travel (main folder)
-Sweden sub folder)
--2009 (sub sub folder)
--2010
---2010-07 - Work in Stockholm (project)
I do not easily remember when a shot was made so I organised according to what happened.
Now I have found out that it is not the ideal method. After a while I find pictures which actually belongs more naturally to another project but it was shot during a certain project.
Like:
Family
-Our boy
-Our girl
--2010
---20100501 - Girls birthday party
However, there could be a close-up portrait of our boy shot on the girl´s party. Should I move that photo to the boy´s folder?
After a while this becomes a nightmare ...
And I lack the time to put keywords on everything on every photo and keep updating those keywords by looking through all photos.
So now I reconsider to store everything cronologically according to shooting date and keep the photos stored in the projects there.
Then I will make a folder structure like above but with albums. It could also be organised using the keywords to make smart albums of major things and persons to easily find portraits etc. I'm not yet sure what to do.
And how should I make with all those old scanned slides which date is very uncertain? These files are very big too.
Of course this depends what you make. If you are a wedding photographer it could be quite simple.
If you mix work with family and research it could be a much more difficult situation which in the long term will need more thoughts.
One thing is sure: Consider this in the beginning very carefully before you have organised all your photos in the wrong way!