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Keeping Your Library Up To Date
Last night I had a minor Aperture meltdown. This doesn’t happen too often, as the way in which I use Aperture seems to keep things in check most of the time. However, I still have a really large pile of “yet to be organized” photography that I shot well before Aperture ever graced my Mac’s Applications folder.
Most of these images are grouped into Projects and Albums by year, month and date. Some of them have IPTC info applied (though mostly just the selects) and most are just images I shot and never bothered to process.
For example, back when I used to shoot weddings for a small wedding firm, I would go out, shoot the wedding and burn them a pile of DVDs. I would do no post processing, I wouldn’t even rename the files. I would simply burn the cards to DVD, sometimes without even touching a computer.
Later I would usually copy the original files over to a hard drive for my personal archive. Before Aperture, these would just sit in folders, usually arranged by date. That was it. I had no further interest in the photos, so they just sat there on the hard drive, collecting virtual dust.
I did this off and on for years, eventually collecting a mass of un-organized images, that I really had little interest in ever using again.
Well, eventually I got Aperture, and wanted to start using it to archive and organize ALL of my digital imagery. So, I imported everything into one Aperture library with the intent to go back and add metadata and organization to everything in my library. Obviously I didn’t get very far. With my time consumed by other projects, new work and all of the other things one has to do in life, I just never got around to it.
So, last night I am sitting in front of the computer, with the task of creating a small portfolio of wedding images for a client when all of the sudden I realize how insurmountable of a task I am facing. Each wedding has over 1000 un-edited images, and I have shot dozens of them.
How am I going to root through all of these images and come up with some type of portfolio, reflective of the type of wedding photography I am capable of?
The first task was to find al of the weddings. I had to basically hunt these down by date, clicking through day after day of un-labeled Projects and Albums. I figured that whenever I found a wedding I would move it to it’s own project and add some appropriate metadata based on my memory.
I decided to create a top level “blue” folder called Weddings, and started moving these projects in. Once I went through my library and found most of the weddings I was looking for I now had the task of editing through the work and creating a small portfolio of around 20 images. This was also no easy task (and still not nearly complete). Since most of my wedding images from long ago are sitting on offline hard drives, I had to first determine which hard drives they were on. This is pretty easy in Aperture, especially if you give each of your hard drives a unique name. Just right click the image, and select “Show in Finder.” If the image is offline, it will tell you which volume to look for. You can also do this using the Manage Referenced Files dialog.
But there are more problems with offline files. I recently moved from another country and I am still in the process of unpacking. I was able to find the drive without any trouble , but then I realized I needed the correct USB cable and power adapter. After digging through a box of what can only be described as “wires” I found what I was after.
The next task was to come up with an editing plan. I figured I needed about 20 images showing different aspects from different weddings. So I made a list of what I wanted, and just started looking through things. If I saw something I liked, I just gave it a star or two and moved on. At the end, I could sort over the entire blue folder for my one star or above images and work from there.
This is about where I am in the process right now. I sort of learned a good lesson here about keeping up to date with your archive. Since I have been using Aperture for along time now, most of my more recent stuff is nicely organized. Each project is labeled with an appropriate name. I have become fairly obsessive about adding caption info, keywords, city and state IPTC info, and other fine details.
I also really like to make albums with selects so I can find them later with ease. I really wish I had been able to do this type of stuff long before Aperture ever caught my attention!
So I have some questions for you readers out there.
1) Do you have a standard routine ( I hate to say the W word anymore ) that you have developed to handle incoming images?
2) Do you have a big pile of un-organized, pre-Aperture material that is in bad need of some metadata?
3) Where do you store your images, and how easily accessible are they?
4) If someone asked you for 20 images of your best images of a certain genre, how would you go about retrieving and presenting them?
1) Yes (see my blog, but it's fairly bog standard, quick first-pass, corrections and keywords, second pass, time, third pass as necessary). I've added in GPS tagging for some projects (primarily hikes out of town) recently, but the general process allows enough flexibility for me. With flexibility, though, I also allow myself to get a few shoots "behind" on the second pass. I currently have about a month's worth of keywording to get done, which will take a good two hours from experience.
2) I've successfully moved all my pre-Aperture images over into Aperture and have keywords applied. There's still processing and rating fine-tuning which could be done, but the Smart Album of Abigail, for instance, brings up good pictures of her from the past 12 years. Adding location information (area/city/state) to that backlog is my current project.
3) I'm using a managed library (a single managed library), and so everything is online all the time.
4) Of a certain genre, I couldn't (I haven't been tagging by "genre" of any sort). Ask me for pictures of a certain person, though, and I can come up with a set of all their selected pictures with a simple search. Locations haven't been religiously applied, so that's one of my "backlog" projects. Otherwise, the date and project views allow me to find specific pictures when we have an idea of when they were shot.
I find that there is really never a "fully tagged" library. If you think you have everything fully tagged, you probably just aren't thinking about it hard enough :) That having been said, there is a "sweet spot" between where tagging will conceivably pay off in saved search times, and where tagging is just wasting time. What exactly that spot is obviously varies by type of photographer. As an amateur family photographer, my common searches are for people (and specific groups of people), places, and events. I'm not often looking for "a picture, any picture, with a bridge", for instance. When I have my unpaid sports photographer hat on, I'm concerned with the subjects as well as the type of play they are making, so my keywords adjust accordingly.
#2 yes... and keep avoiding the task.
#3 Using a Netgear ReadyNAS with 4 x 1 TB disks in it. (As Referenced files) But I need to back this up too, and in time will need bigger drives. Maybe solid-state hard drives are closer than we think?
1) Not really. I'd like to. I've yet to truly the 1 > 2 > 3 type star approach. It appeals to me and I'd like to get a routine going. Generally I just go through a stack of images and look. Then I'll go back and go through the adjustments HUD. But it's kind of willy-nilly in the sense that I just flip around - which I why I LOVE aperture.
2) Actually not to bad. I keep or try to keep projects with meaningful names. I also only have about 12,000 shots (and most of those aren't great) between 2 aperture libraries. I'm still not sure how I feel about having a normal plus archive library. It keeps the projects cleaner and need for a bigger backup drive down, but something feels off. Metadata and keywording are a different story. I'm getting better thanks to Aperture esp. using the import pane to do things. However, keywordig on import isn't as good as it should be and it's a pain to go through stuff in the middle of school. So guess what one of my summer projects is starting next week?
3) I'm using 2 managed libraries on my laptop that only total 46GB. So no problems yet.
4) Hmm. Go through my 4+ images to see what I can do. Also I might just go through everything because as I become a better photographer and as I'm better with Ap and as it grows I learn I can do a lot with a mediocre image and make it good. I just mean editing things like color and what not, not changing the image with PS or plugins.
For me Ap's flexibility is great, but it also makes finding the perfect setup a pain.
On initial project import, I turn on preview [p] and quickly go through the images, rating along the way, using keystokes control + - for rejected and control + = for kept. After I have rated them all, I give it 24 hours then go through again increasing the rating for the "good" ones. After that, I begin processing. If anything is "great", it gets 3 stars. "Favorites" are 4 stars, and "Best Work" is 5 stars. I used to keyword everything but have started keywording only 3 stars and up.
Because of religiously use smart folders, I can quickly access great-to-best work based on how projects are organized.
. . . it works for me.
I use Aperture as a work area.
1) I first download my images into a "Download" folder with the subfolder name of the source of the image, ie whether the image is from my camera, scanners or from the internet. I then import the file as a referenced image to the appropriate "InBox" in Aperture.
I then make a back-up of the "Download" file to an external drive. I can now reformat the camera card as I have a safe back-up.
I now edit my shoot and export the versions and or masters to my managed archive with descriptive file names and place them in folders which are named by topic. I have been organizing my archive this way since I started with slides in about '75. After back-ups are made the remaining pictures and masters are deleted from the Aperture library and the "Download" file is emptied of the edited
2) The problem with this system is adding keywords. The ones added using Aperture do not export and the Spotlight comments do not import to Aperture. This is a problem because I started my archive long before I was using Aperture.
3) My photos are immediately accessible in my managed archive because I can quickly drill my way down on subject matter. If a folder gets to be more than 25 or so images I usually subdivide it if the diversity allows it. If I want to have a good look at some images in a folder I can quickly go into finder, highlight all the images and open them in preview. Or I can import them into Aperture if I want to mess with them.
One reason I like managing my own archive is that it makes it easier to retrieve images from the back-up drive. I do not need to restore a whole library but just go get the messed up or lost image from the back-up. (I use Chronosync to back-up my images.)
It sounds complicated to write it out like this but I can edit and manage my images quite easily without consciously thinking where I am putting images and what their status is.
(1) I do.. (a) I do a quick review and mark the rejects; (b) I complete most of the metadata fields that I use and did not dill-in during import; (c) I assign keywords associated to the categories of my work; (d) I mark some of the images as belonging to some active projects (also using keywords); (e) Rate the images (in a second round editing process); (f) I caption the most relevant images (4 and 5 stars). If I decide to upload to my web personal archive (Photoshelter) or to my stock agency, then I further keyword.
(2) I went through all my work (I am newer to photography, so I did not have that much work), and did most of the prior process.
(3) I use the referenced approach to store my images. They are all in a raid 5 in my mac-pro (1.5TB). I use super-duper to mirror this drive into a G-Tech Raid 1 that I take offsite as a redundant backup.
(4) I can retrieve by category. Since I started using Aperture, I categorize every single import into any of the 5 categories of work that I do (some more than others). Then I have smart albums that bring 4 and 5 stars by category (street, travel, landscapes, people, etc.).
(1) Yes.
(2) Not yet, I seem to keep modifying the way I do things as I learn.
(3) Several external hard drives, but admittedly not a simple perfect solution yet.
(4) This is easy and no need to use the star ratings, which can be limiting. First thing to do is to include a word in the Keywords that can identify the image rating and type. So for example, I might include the keywords 'wedding', 'best', 'favourite', 'alltimebest', etc etc.
Next, in the Projects pane, select Library and then create a new Smart Album and label it 'Best Weddings' and repeat this for each genre that you shoot. You can also create an 'All Time Best' one as well. Now in each new Smart Album, use the sort feature to select only images that have the keywords that apply to that Smart Album. So for my favourite wedding shots, I choose 'favourite' and 'wedding' as the criteria. As new weddings are shot, and these keywords are added accordingly, the new images will appear in this smart album.
Keywording is key once more.
Note, you might want to prefix the title of all these new smart albums with 01, 02 etc so that they stay in the order you want and all together under the 'Projects' tab.
Hope this helps.
Michael
1) Yes. I have several top level blue folders for my categories named like this: BPC (Local photo club I go out and shoot with now and then), Experimental (when I want to try something), Sports, Family, Weddings, Portraits, and Personal (for things I don't want to end up public). Some blue folders have sub blue folders for years, when the project gets too big. The family folder also has a Locations folder so if I'm taking pictures of a trip - it's Family->Year->Location->Project to get to the pictures.
Each import "session" becomes a project, but I do have one top level project called Unfiled for things I need to dump off a card but don't want to organize yet.
There is also two handy top level smart albums, one called No Keywords and the other Unrated. Makes it easy to see what I need to work on next.
I also have a handy top level smart album that I use to track how many images I've shot this month (aperture has one, but I believe it's for the last 30 days, I just want June for instance). This was for a personal goal to shoot more/practice, so I can keep track of where I am on my goal.
2) Not really, but there's always more metadata to add.
3) Aperture library is now larger than my MacBook Pro HD, so it's currently on a WD 500 GB fw800 drive and Vaulted to 2 fw400 drives (that I need to replace soon).
4) I don't have 20 images of a genre that I love. Out of several thousand images, I only have about 100 that are 5 star, maybe 10 per genre. My family, friends and clients like way more images than I do.