I know photographers who delete in the field, trimming down the images on their card by reviewing what they shot on the back of the camera and getting rid of what they don’t like. I probably have the opposite philosophy and there are a lot of reasons why this is not a good idea. Firstly when I’m out shooting, I don’t like to break my concentration by reviewing images, never mind deleting them except for checking the histogram and making sure things are being captured properly to my CF cards. The screens are small and often hard to really see clearly, and you can miss elements in the image you may not be aware of. Besides, there’s plenty of time to decide to delete the bad images in Aperture later.

Even in post-processing, there are those that keep an Aperture Library tight and trim by deleting images they think they will never use, and those that keep virtually everything they shoot.

There are good reasons for both approaches, and that could be the subject of another post, but for now, I wanted to talk about deleting in Aperture.

Aperture gives you lots of ways to delete both versions and masters from your albums, web pages and Aperture Library itself; but you want to always delete with caution.

Removing a version from an album, web gallery or book is as easy as selecting that version and hitting the Delete Key. Only that version is removed, All other versions of the image in your library (including the master) are left untouched.

The “Command Delete” combination is when things can get dangerous, you just need to be aware of what you are doing and how Aperture deletes. Aperture does give you warnings when you are about to do something you may regret, but I still have heard horror stories.

If you have a few versions of a particular master and want to delete a version from a project, select that version and hold down the command key as you press the delete key. This version is deleted immediately, no questions asked and everything else remains including your master.

But if the version you select is the only version from the master image, Aperture asks you if you want to delete the master as well as the version. If you’re not concentrating you may accidentally delete the master when you didn’t really want to.

When deleting versions, you can always undo (CMD Z) to change your mind, but when you delete a master and other versions the undo function is no longer available. Aperture reminds you that versions are used in other places and wants to make sure deleting that version is what you want to do.

Deleting a version is not that serious compared to accidentally losing a master raw image. But you can still get it back. Aperture places the deleted Master (with a managed library) in a folder in the trash, which you can recover. With referenced libraries, Aperture will only delete the Master if you check the “move referenced files to trash” when prompted.

A very real danger is if you have a project selected in the projects pane and then hit command>delete. If you’re not paying attention you can accidentally delete an entire project. It would be nice if there was some sort of siren that came on or somebody slapped you while this was happening, but you just have to be careful.

Too Aperture Engineers credit, even when you delete an entire project, Aperture moves it to the trash which lets you get it back as long as you haven’t deleted the trash. Just drag the folder back into the projects pane and Aperture re-imports the images into a new project and album. But be careful.