As your Aperture Library grows in size, the ability to search for images becomes more and more important...

First up, there are a whole series of places you can search in Aperture - the search box and button at the top of the Browser pane, Smart Albums and the magnifying glass next to ‘Library’ at the top of the Projects pane.

Browser pane - any searches here will search within the images visible in the Browser pane, so whatever Project, Folder of Album you’ve currently selected.

Smart Albums - these search through whatever Project or Blue Folder they were created in - so if you move a Smart Album it still searches the original location. To create one that looks through the entire Library, select ‘Library’ at the top of the Project pane and then hit Comand-Shift-L.

Library - using this search HUD will search through the entire Library, much like a top-level Smart Album, but temporary.

What can you search for?

Almost anything. Ratings, EXIF or IPTC data, keywords, custom tags, adjustments, dates etc.

Most of the search settings are fairly obvious, but a few specifics are worth mentioning.

Any/All - choose between images that fit any of the search criteria, or all of the search criteria. Personally, I don’t use ‘Any’ very often as I’m trying to reduce the number of returns rather than increase them, but options are always good.

Adding criteria twice - the cogwheel at the top right of the search HUD allows you to add extra search criteria. Apart from the obvious bits like adding an EXIF search, you can add two of the same type of search and put different options in each, such as all images that include certain keywords, then in a second keyword section, exclude all images that contain certain other keywords. This can make for some really sophisticated search settings.

Adjustments - being able to search for adjustments can be a godsend, especially searching for Sepia Tone, Monochrome mixer or Color Monochrome to pick up all your B&W conversions. Also potentially useful for seeing if you want to migrate older images that are still using old versions of the Raw decoding engine.

File Status - online/offline, managed/referenced. Absolutely vital if you are moving between managed and referenced files, and for general file management tasks.

Context - you may have noticed that the search HUD sometimes gives different options, and can take awhile to open up.
This is because the HUD only gives you options for the current context - in an Album, only keywords that exist in the Album’s images will be listed, the calendar will only highlight days that images have been shot on etc. As you can imagine, when opening a search HUD that covers the entire Library or a large number of images, this information can take a moment to gather.

Keywords & IPTC data - if you haven’t entered anything, you can’t search for it. If at all possible, try to keep up to date when it comes to keywording and adding other IPTC data that you might need. Alternatively, the ‘is empty’ option when searching can be very handy for pinpointing images without captions, while ‘are not applied’ will pick out all the images with no keywords.