Organizing photographic work in Aperture

Member Joined: 05 Sep 2005 Posts: 170 Location: Denmark

With easter holiday coming up, and a new version of Aperture issued from Apple I have finally decided moving my photographic work from iPhoto's realms of easy.

My iPhoto library contains around 12000 pictures and growing by aprox 5000 a year (divided equally between family snaps and art) and some HD video (10 hours a year). On top of that I expect to scan my old negatives (another 5000 high res picts in sloooow proces with a flatbed Epson)

Do you import all your scanning and edit them i Aperture, or do you prefer Photoshop for minor adjusting and then import? Do you use several libraries or keep everything in one place? Do you still keep a backup of your family snaps in iPhoto anyway? What about video footage captured on same memory card as the pictures?

I would appreciate a few good advices how YOU organize your work in Aperture.

Moon

Posted: Wed Mar 31, 2010 7:04 am

Welcome to Aperture. I know that every one has their own workflow so I will share some of what I use.
First, I wouldn't try importing all 12000 pictures in one session. Maybe a year at a time. I have my Aperture organized by year. I put all pictures from one year in a folder. Then I organize that folder into projects like Vacation, Christmas, Reunion etc. You can then further sort the projects into albums like for each city on a vacation.
Now that you can change to a different library without restarting I make a library for each year. I keep these stored on an external HD which is backed up on Time Machine.
Before I import my pictures into Aperture I put a copy in a folder on another external HD. At the end of the year I burn that folder to DVD's. I use managed pictures rather that referenced. I also have two Vaults, on separate HD's. All of this may be too much, but it works for me. I hate to loose pictures.
Good luck.

Member Joined: 05 Sep 2005 Posts: 170 Location: Denmark

By now I'm fully into Aperture. And I love it. I'm usually not keen on Users Manual, but Aperture 3 really has a lot of options you wouldn't find by just probing around. The online tutorials have been great. I did find a nice little thing on my own though: If you are in Full Screen Mode - which is great - you circle through tools by typing w. I get a sense that this application is made for professionals, and you can obtain very fast workflows...

Thanks AR_Geek for sharing a bit of your workflow.

So you actually do the organizing in folders outside Aperture before you import them? The problem for me is that my photos in my iPhoto-library is spread out in iPhoto's not-very-transparent organization (folders in folders with only a date to guide you). So I actually tried an import with all 12000 pictures in one go. It took a few ours to complete, but everything went smooth except that quite a few photos for some reason are duplicated despite the fact that I unchecked Aperture options to import duplicates (I haven't yet been able to find an option to import only Masters). Having more versions of a shot is not a major problem, as all duplicates are kept in stacks, so I can close them and do slide shows etc as usual in iPhoto without repeating any shoots. In fact I prefer Apertures to iPhotos behavior as for a while I have been a little frustrated when iPhoto not very intuitively includes "hidden photos" when you do a slide show of an event.

Organizing by year from now on seem to be a good idea AR_Geek. Thanks. You wrote: Before I import my pictures into Aperture I put a copy in a folder on another external HD...

How you import? Just from the the memory card via finder?

Moon Shocked

Posted: Sat Apr 03, 2010 3:29 am

I have been using Aperture since version 1.5. Never really got into iPhoto. I import using a card reader. I create a folder and name it for the project, for example, Grand_Canyon_06_16_09. I use Adobe DNG Converter to import the pictures from the card, convert to DNG and put into the folder. That is my backup folder. I then import from that folder into a project in Aperture. I import the masters into Aperture rather than using the referenced option. My Aperture libraries are on one HD and my backup folder is on another.
I like using DNG because the files are a little smaller and I don't have to keep up with those pesky XMP files if I decide to do something with the originals in Photoshop.
For me, being able to quickly export in different formats is great.

Member Joined: 05 Sep 2005 Posts: 170 Location: Denmark

Thanks again AR_Geek for sharing...