Q: Advice for Organizing Images for my needs
I started using aperture 5 years ago and stopped because my intial organizational concepts were flawed so I ended up with a mess and got discouraged. I want to use Aperture for a completely different need at this time so I want to start fresh on the right foot. My needs don't seem to fit in with anything I've found online.
I am a surgeon and I photograph my patients before and after surgery. I take 10-15 photos of a patient each time and I may end up with 1000-2000 images on my camera before I get around to enter them each time. I need to be able to organize the photos by patient, perhaps keeping images separated for each patient by date, or by 'before' and 'after' although it's not uncommon for patients to have multiple surgeries- so somehow organizing each pagtient into specific dates makes the most sense.
My issue is that if I import 2000 images into a project at once and I then break them down into an 'album' for each patient and 'folders' under each patient's album for each date photos are taken several issues come up...although this strategy is the only logical way I can come up with. First, I need to somehow keep track of which of the 2000 images in the Project have been placed into albums and which ones have not. In the end, every image needs to end up in one and only one album. Is there a way to keep track of this in Aperture? Can I somehow look at all the images in a Project and know which ones have or have not been distributed into Albums? Alternatively, is there a way for me to 'Move' the image out of the Project into an Album? It's imperative that every image imported gets categorized under the appropriate patient's name.
Next, in this scheme, would I put images from the Project into each album as well as each folder under each album? Or is the 'album' merely a header underwhich the folders are listed just for visual ease of organization? Perhaps it's still my philosophies from my PC days getting in the way of my reasoning. Also, if there's a way to keep track of photos that have not yet been placed into albums, is there any reason to use a new 'project' for each import? EVentually I'll end up with lots of projects.
I'm open to suggestions but I'm afraid to get started until someone who knows better than me gives me some advice.
Thanks in advance.
Posted on Feb 8, 2014 6:50 AM
Wow...Not what I was thinking at all- but now that I read what you wrote a few times to digest it fully, it makes sense to me. So take the large project and split it up into smaller projects- one for each patient. This forces the original grouping to shrink as photos are categorized into patient projects. How do I 'split' the projects? Can I do this at once? What I mean is like putting photos of a single patient into something like a stack, doing this for each patient, and then splitting each 'stack' into it's own project? Or do I need to do one at a time?
Now the idea of using 'Smart Albums' based on keywords- is there some way to automate this? I mean force every project that's created to have specific smart folders under their heirarchy? Or must I do this manually for each patient project?
So in the end, if I'm understanding correctly, my original project that was used for the import will be empty (so I can delete it.) Each patient will have their own 'Project' that basically holds all the 'Master' images (well not really the Master because that's kept in the Library...but the 'Main' image, and each project will then have 'Albums' or 'Smart Albums' beneath them in heirarchy containing a 'Version' of the master.
Do I have this right?
Posted on Feb 8, 2014 8:23 AM
