One of the things I have always liked about Aperture is the way you can kind of do things in any order you want. Because Aperture uses a non-destructive approach to image editing, adjustments, crops, and other changes can be applied anywhere and at any time.

However, even with an awesome tool like Aperture, it pays to understand how doing some of the most basic tasks in the right order can really help speed up your workflow.

Here’s an example.

Lets say you have just shot a big wedding and you have shot over 1000 images to deal with. What do you do next? Well, obviously the first task is to get them into Aperture and get them backed up. No problem, just import them from your cards and use Aperture’s vault to back them up to another location. You may choose during import to rename the files, add metadata, and decide if you want them to be referenced or managed, but all of this can be done later if you want.

An issue may arise however, when you decide that after editing through the pictures, you have a number of sets of images that you want to make into a number of sizes of prints. Some you want to be 4x6, some 5x7 and a smaller set you want to be 8x10. Some of the images will be printed at all three formats, and some will not.

Your first inclination is to create albums for each format and drag in the images that you want. However, doing so can create a problem because now you have the same versions in multiple albums, and you need to apply different crops. No matter, just make duplicate versions for each crop, right? Well, that works, but how do you know which version goes with which crop. And, on top of that, how do you export the right versions all at once when the time comes to send them to your printer?

So here is how I would do it.

1. I start with the entire import at the Project level. I go through and pick out the images I want to be 4x6 simply by increasing the star-rating. I am planning to remove this star rating later, as I am just using this to filter my picks at the moment.
2. Now that I have them filtered I do a Command-A to select all of them and I click Duplicate Version from the images menu. At this point it is important to note that the duplicates are the ones that are now selected.
3. With the duplicates selected I can click the New Album option from the File menu. This creates a new album within my project that not only contains my selected images, but has marked the correct version as the “Album Pick,” denoted by the check mark in the top-middle of the thumbnail.


4. In my new album I can now do a Command-A to select them all again and then Shift-K to collapse all the stacks.


5. Collapsed I now see the album pick on the top of my stack instead of the main stack pick.


6. When they are collapsed I can easily apply my 4x6 format crop and export the correct versions to my desktop so that I can upload them to my printer.

If I go back to the project level I can continue the process for the 5x7 set as well. Doing this in this exact order will give me what I want each time. If I had gone through my images and made duplicate versions as needed, adding the crops and then creating the albums, picking out which versions should be the album pick would require a good deal of work on my part. I would have to go through them one by one and make my selections.

This is one of those simple tasks that can get quite complicated when you have thousands of images to deal with, but if you do things in the right order, it should work out just fine.