By default Aperture has a series of “built-in” smart albums that appear automatically. These smart albums function at the library level - meaning Aperture looks at all the images you import and any images that fit the criteria associated with that smart album, are displayed within that smart album. These albums appear nested within Library in the Projects Panel. Of course the images in these smart albums are also displayed in whatever other projects and albums you’ve selected to contain them. The built-in smart albums make it easy to check for all your 5 star images, all images you imported within the last week, or all your rejected images among other things.

I rely on the Rejected album because when I edit, I use the 9 key to reject images, rather than doing the more cumbersome two key stoke combination to actually delete the images. I find that way I more aggressively reject images, knowing that if I change my mind, I can go to the Rejected album and recover the image just by changing its rating. Giving a quick glance through the Rejected album gives me one last chance to make certain I really want to delete those files. I click the V key to get the Browser only view, press Cmnd+A to select all the images and then Cmnd +delete all of them.

Recently I managed to accidentally delete the Rejected Smart Album itself. Aperture has set it up so that you can remove any of these albums that you don’t need by selecting the album and then pressing Cmnd + Delete. Of course that means that if you think you’ve selected an image or images, but in fact have the Smart Album selected,and hit Cmnd+Delete, the Smart Album disappears. If you realize it immediately, Cmnd+Z will restore the album. But if you don’t notice what you did immediately - or if you intentionally deleted the album and then decide you want it back, the steps to restore it are not so obvious. Simply relaunching Aperture doesn’t restore the default albums - since you may have deliberately done away with them. Thanks to David Schloss of AUN for instructions on how to restore default albums. First quit Aperture, go to the Finder and in your User folder, navigate to the Library/Application Support/Aperture folder. Delete BuiltinSmartAlbums.plist, then restart Aperture. When you relaunch Aperture the default Smart Albums will all appear.

You can create your own Smart Albums at the library level by clicking on Library to select it and then New >Smart Album setting whatever criteria you choose. However these Smart Albums will be purple, not blue, and will not appear at the top of the list - they’ll appear alphabetically interspersed among your projects. I do that for a Favorites smart album. Just be aware that if you delete the project containing those images, they will disappear from the Favorites album.