Digital Media | Spotlight: Photography | Inside Aperture | Blogs
Old Habits Die Hard
I have an admission to make. I have one very bad habit in my workflow that I just can’t seem to shake loose. There is a project in my workflow called “Import” that has been sitting there since I first opened Aperture some three years ago!
The contents of this Import project are pretty dynamic. They change often but some of the images in there have been sitting there waiting for my attention for as long as I can remember. I’m not really sure what they are of or why I want them, but they are there, waiting in vain.
This is the product of a lazy habit I have developed. I am pretty sure this habit is a rollover trait of mine from the days before I was using Aperture to import all of my digital files.
You see, the way I work is pretty haphazard. I am much more organized and concise when I am shooting assignments, but when it comes to documentary and street photography the idea of a “Project” takes time to develop. In other words, I just shoot shoot shoot and worry about the concept of a project once things get rolling.
The byproduct of this methodology is that many times, when I am importing my work, I am not really sure what to call it. Instead of thinking about the shoot or the collected images from over a number of shoots stored on a few cards, I just send them all into a project called Import, with the hopes that I will one day come back and re-organize everything. Bad Micah!
Fortunately, with Aperture, re-organizing is easy! I just create a new project and drag things around until I am happy with the results, but I really wish I had a better plan in place for shoots like these so that I wouldn’t have so much work to do later.
To circumvent this bad habit I have been trying to come up with a few contingencies in order to keep myself from regressing back to the way things were before Aperture.
Here is short list of a few basic rules that I am doing ym best to follow when importing my cards.
Avoid the Generic -- Obviously, I need to get away from the “Import” folder. Be sure to always make a new project for everything you shoot. Think about a naming convention, and try sorting things via the blue folders. I am shooting a lot of street stuff these days so I made a blue folder called Baltimore Street and below it I create a new project for each import I do.
Basic IPTC is MANDATORY -- During import be sure to apply some generic metadata to the batch of images you are importing. Usually city and state, copyright info, etc can be applied to each image as they come in. This will at least give you some metadata to work with even if you don’t bother to caption and keyword every photo individually.
Use Aperture’s Import Panel -- Instead of just clicking “Import All” use the import panel to your advantage. There are lots of options there to choose from. You can assign the images IPTC info, you can rename things, adjust date and time and put things into auto stacks. But, what’s more is you can selectively import from your cards. If you find yourself with a variety of “shoots” on a single card import them one at a time by selecting out the images on import. Don’t just dump them into a single project and re-organize later. I always forget to do this!
Come Up With Your Own Concept for a Project -- Aperture Projects can be a variety of things. They could be a shoot, a month, or whatever you can think of. It is essentially an organizational unit. Try and come up with a single idea of what a Project means to you. This will depend greatly on what you shoot and how you organize things.
Well, as the title of this post says, old habits do die hard. I am still trying to keep myself from generating a growing unorganized Aperture library. It takes time to rewire your brain into being more organized, and thankfully Aperture is helping me in that regard. I would be really interested to hear how others import their images. What sort of tricks do you have to keep things up to date? How much time do you spend thinking about how to organize your work? Is it working? I want to hear about it!
This is a problem I suffer from as well, I admit. Except for me, I'll go, 'well, I will just import a new project.' Then? I ended up with about 14 'Untitled project' variants. This was, to put it mildly, a Bad Thing. And took hours and hours of cleanup work to deal with.
I haven't yet found my perfect import solution, but at least now I name my untitled projects things like 'Fremont Street-shooting 2008-08-12' or whatever.
I always name my projects by date of the first photo in it.
and each project consists all photos from one 'off-load' to my computer.
sometimes i divide it up into more projects or combine some.
I also have an Import folder "01 - Import", which is followed by "02 - Rated" and "03 - Keyworded" and finally by "04 - Processed".
So after a project had been fully rated in the Import folder it moves to the Rated folder, there I assign keywords to the photos that need them, and then move it to keyworded and from there I export the images, and then move the project to its final resting place where it is all organized in folders by year then month.
I dont use the Import panel from aperture, I just drag folders from the Finder straight into Aperture to make a new project. And I dont import straight from the camera/memory card because I first need to do some complex renaming of the photos.
In the past, whenever I would move photos between projects the thumbnails would break and I would have to manually open up the Aperture Library package, delete the caches, and then twiddle my thumbs for a few hours while Aperture recreated them. So I finally gave up and stopped moving photos between projects completely. Do you know if this problem has been fixed in a recent update? And I don't mean mostly fixed, but completely fixed. I'd like to be able to use projects again, but I'm not going to touch them unless they're 100% reliable.
@Mark
In the 'Images' menu in your menubar there is an option 'Generate Thumbnails' maybe that can help if the problem still exists?
why dont you simply make a new aperture library and import some images into it, make multiple projects and test if the problem still exists for you there, if not, try it on your main library, (perhaps with some test images and not the real things..)
I maintain my own archive and work with referenced Images. My workflow is as follows:
Using Aperture I download the pictures into an "Inbox" appropriate for the tool used to create the image. i.e. pictures from my FZ50 go into an project titled FZ50 or images from the LS2000 slide scanner go into a project called LS2000. As I work using referenced images so the actual file falls under Pictures>Download>FZ50 or LS2000
I then make a Back-up of the download file to an external drive and then clear the memory card, put a fresh battery in the camera, charge the other camera battery, and set the camera to my default settings. This way if their is a call to action I am ready to go.
The next step is to toss the crud. Then I go through another time and anything I want to seriously edit (Photoshop or whatever) goes into another project folder. The rest get tweaked and then exported as versions, with renaming, to folders appropriate to subject matter i.e. Photos>Archive>xxx island>Harbour>Night>Fireworks and the photo files would have the name July-4_01, July-4_01 etc. if I had been shooting fireworks on July 4th. After exporting I delete the just exported images from Aperture and they are also gone from the Download folder
This way I can always find what I am looking for.
But, as you pointed out, there are always some images which defy classification. These I stuff in "Misc." and when this file gets large, an re-examination of the images can usually suggest one or more new categories.
If I am on a trip I use my MBP and download images by date, junk the obvious crud and back-up to my external drive. I have an OWC 2.5" drive and I keep it separate from the MBP as much as possible in case of theft or other disasters. When I get home I transfer the files to my iMac.
My hack for this same problem borrows iPhoto's concept of rolls: each time I import a non-project-specific set of images, they get put into a "Roll 357 - Ducks at pond" project. These rolls are then arranged in folders by date (2008/July/Roll 357), making it easy to flip through them still. It's still not as perfect as I would like, but works pretty well.