New to Aperture? Some Considerations when Designing your First Aperture Library

Aperture has been designed to manage very large databases. My main Aperture library holds all my private photos of our family history back to 1880. To be able to use a large database efficiently, and to find the photos you want to retrieve quickly, you need to design your library by setting up folders, albums, smart albums, keyword suitable for your workflow. Simply importing images and and letting the library grow will quickly lead to frustration. Take the time to familiarize yourself with Aperture's Library items.

( The Well-Trod Path: a Beginner's Guide to how Aperture's major parts inter-relate,

How do I access my Photos in Aperture?

http://documentation.apple.com/en/aperture/usermanual/)

Start with a small experimental library, that you are prepared to discard. Try out the features, until you get a feeling for navigating a library.

Then sit down with a large pot of coffee or tea and give yourself time to think about the way you want to find and retrieve your images in Apertures.

Plan and design your storage and retrieval structure. Don't just dump all your images into your new library. The better you plan the design in advance and analyze your workflow, the easier it will be to implement and maintain the structure once you set it up. Otherwise you might end up continually redesigning your library. You will need to plan and design for three task: Storing the images (folders and projects), accessing/retrieving the images (albums, smart albums, metadata like keywords, faces, places), maintaining the library.

• Storage structure to group the projects: Set up a scheme of folders to group and hold related projects, for example folders for family related events, like birthdays or anniverasies, folders for business related projects, folders for sporting events, travels, etc. You might want to break this down further by creating subfolders for years, or other specifics. My travel folder has subfolders for 10-years groups of travels, to be able to collapse or disclose larger parts of the projects list. And these groups are further subdivided by folders for sailing trips, biking trips, wildlife safaris.
• Retrieval structure - albums, smart albums, keywords, faces, places: The retrieval part of the library will give you quick access by grouping related images.
  • If you like to access photos based on the names of the persons in the photos, use the Faces view to tag the faces in the images.
  • If the location is important, use the Places view or geocoding software to tag the photos with location information or GPS coordinates.
  • Keywords you have to plan on your own. For example, I have a set of keywords based on the purpose I want to use the photos for: Screensaver, web album, publication, book, collection.
  • Other keywords mark my collections: Lighthouses, flowers, wildlife pictures.
  • Some keywords describe the quality of the photos - favorite, corrupted, too grainy, noisy
  • Some keywords describe the source of the image - raytracing, drawing, scan, panorama stitch
• Maintainance structure: I found, it helps also to have dedicated smart albums that will refer to the state of processing and properties of the image files:
  • Smart albums based on the file type: raw, jpeg, tiff
  • Smart albums based on the state of tagging - geocoded, faces, adjusted
  • Smart albums based on the file status - referenced, missing, managed
  • Smart albums based on the camera model or lens
  • A playground with projects of duplicates for experimenting

Once you have thought about your workflow and the ways you need to access and use your photos, define keywords that reflect these uses well. Define smart albums based on these keywords and other metadata tags available, like the make of the camera.

-- Léonie