I'm partial to that one, too. 🙂. The formatting got busted when Discussions were upgraded. Anything between plus signs should be in italics.
Here it is correctly formatted:
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The Well-trod Path. Walk it unless you have a map for a different route.
The Library is your image database. It contains all the information Aperture has about your images: where they are stored on your computer/drives/network, how you have them organized within Aperture, what adjustments you have made to them, all the pre-Aperture metadata (EXIF, IPTC, keywords, etc.) they had before you imported them into Aperture, and all the Aperture metadata (Version names, ratings, color labels, Stacks, additional keywords, etc.) you assign to them from within Aperture. The Library also contains small copies of each image (in effect, thumbnails, but in Aperture larger than actual thumbnails and called "Previews").
The image is the core record in your Aperture database. The database is a giant list of images with a whole bunch of information assigned to each image.
Within Aperture you can view individual images and any grouping of images. You can create a group based on any of the information you have about your images.
The Project is your primary image holder. It has a unique, privileged relationship with your images: Every image must be in a Project; No image can be in more than one Project. You should make a Project from every actual, out-in-the-world photo shoot that you do. Shoot=Project. Stick to this (the mis-naming of "Project" is one of the worst interface decisions made in Aperture).
You will regularly want to view your images in groups other than the Project in which they reside. Aperture provides several specific containers for this (as well as superb tools for creating ad hoc groupings). As a family, those containers are Albums. Aperture includes (regular) Albums, Smart Albums, and the following albums dedicated to special tasks: Book, Light Table, Slide Show, Web Journal, Web Page. Any image can be in any album, and can be in as many albums as you want.
As your Aperture database grows, you will want to organize your Projects and Albums. Aperture provides Folders to aid you. Folders hold groups of Projects, Albums, and other Folders. Folders cannot contain images which are not in a Project or Album: You do not put images in Folders; you put containers in Folders.
The organization of your image database is entirely for you to customize for your needs.
There are two additional pieces of the Aperture puzzle every new user needs to understand in order to make good use of it.
In additional to what I listed above, your Library may or may not contain your original image files. Each image in Aperture has an original. Aperture is non-destructive -- your original image files are never altered. If the original image file is contained within your Library, it is called a Managed Master (Aperture's pointer to this file, and the file itself, are both inside the Library). If the original image file is not contained within your Library, it is called a Referenced Master (the pointer in your Aperture Library points to a file outside your Aperture Library). Referenced Masters bring some important advantages -- but the new user of Aperture can rely on Managed Masters until the need for Referenced Masters arises. Aperture makes is easy to convert your original image files back and forth from Managed to Referenced.
A Version is the name given to the variants and copies you make of you original image within Aperture. You use Aperture's tools to make Adjustments to images. Each group of adjustments you make to one image is saved as a Version. You can (and should) create as many Versions as you need. Versions appear as images, but are simply text instructions which tell Aperture what Adjustments to make to the original image file. Aperture presents these to you on-the-fly. This is brilliant. It means that Versions are minuscule compared to Masters. The gain in storage and computational efficiency is enormous.
This also means that your images in Aperture do not exist as image format files. In order to create an image format file, you must export the image from within Aperture. There is no reason to do this until you need an image format file outside of Aperture.
Aperture, then, is best understood as a workspace for
- storing
- organizing
- adjusting
- preparing for publication, and
- publishing
digital photographs.
Your workflow is
- shoot
- import as Project(s)
- add image-specific metadata
- organize into Albums, organize Albums and Projects with Folders
- make adjustments to images (crop, rotate, change exposure, etc. etc. etc)
- prepare for publication
- publish.
HTH. 😉
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Thanks for posting the link.
