Digital Media | Spotlight: Photography | Inside Aperture | Blogs
Reducing and Sorting Images
I've found that a common task I need to do is sort a large collection of images down to a smaller collection and pass those along to someone else. I can't always just always send the highest-rated images, because sometimes I have images that I gave a lower rating to but that meet a client's needs better. Thankfully, Aperture makes this task fairly easy--here's how I do it.
The short of what we're going to do is make a smart album that picks up the images we want to look through. As we sort through the images, we'll untag the images we don't want so that they drop out of the smart album. Since we're making a smart album, we have three options as to how we can tag the images. Although there is no specific "flag" function in Aperture, we can still set a specific keyword and filter, we can filter by rating, or we can set and filter on custom metadata.
I tend to not want to adjust my images' ratings when picking a set of shots, and for a task like this, custom metadata can be a bit clunky to use. Therefore, I'll go through the album, picking out the images I'm interested in, and then use Batch Change (Metadata > Batch Change or Command-Shift-b) to set some arbitrary keyword, such as "pickme," on those images. I also will select the keyword I entered and copy it (Edit > Copy) so that I can quickly recall it by hitting paste, Command-v.
Next up, I'll make a new smart album (File > New Smart > Album) and set the quick search field to my keyword. Then, I tend to hide my Projects panel (Window > Hide Projects) and rotate my workspace (Window > Rotate Workspace) to maximize the viewer's screen space. I also turn on the control bar (Window > Show Control Bar) and keyword controls (Window > Show Keyword Controls), giving me quick access to the type-in keyword field that I can use to remove a keyword.
As I sort through the images, I can tweak and compare to my heart's desire, but should I want to remove the image, I simply click in the type-in keyword field in the keyword controls, type Command-v to paste my keyword in, and type Shift-Return to remove the keyword from the current image.
Once I'm done, to clean things up, I'll select all the images left in the smart album and turn them into a normal, dumb album (File > New from Selection > Album). To remove my custom, tagging keyword, cleaning things up a bit more, I select all of the images, make sure Primary Only is off, and then type in my keyword in the keyword control bar and type Shift-Return. This gives me an unchanging album with images that I can export, make a web site with, etc.. Last, but not least, I remove the smart album.
Let me know if you find any tricks to make this task easier!
Comments (3)
Nifty stuff, I particularly like learning about the Shift-Return trick. I always wound up opening the inspector and bringing up keywords in order to remove keywords I no longer want. Thank you.
Boy, since you had to select all the images you would like to tag with that "pickme" keyword, why not simply drag them to a new "dumb" album and then simply remove (with backspace) those you don't want to keep? The end result is the same, isn't it? Why all that keyword-tag-untag-smart-album juggling? Or is it just me?
Good question, Renato, and that would certainly work. I tend to use keywords and smart albums so that I don't have to worry about what's selected, what I've dragged to the album, etc.. I've just found that especially for picking images initially, I'm faster that way (and my wrists prefer less clicking and dragging, too).