Can't create smart album?

While Kirby frowns upon a date based scheme for projects some of us (well me anyway) find that to be a good fit for the type of work that we do.

I store my images in projects that are named for the day the images in it were taken (ie: 2011-10-03). Then that project is placed in a folder structure based on year and month.

Of course off of this I have folders and albums (both regular and smart) that are theme based.

I will occasionally, if it seems right, break the date based storage as in the folder Camera Experiments. The images in those projects are really date independent.

So remember the final set up of your library is really going to be a personal thing, it has to feel right to you. If it doesn't you'll never be comfortable in Aperture.

Also keep in mind that it is highly unlikely that you will get the right structure on your first attempt. You can plan it out to the nth degree but until you've used it in Aperture for a while you just won't know if it's really going to work for you. When I first imported my iPhoto library into Aperture I must have tried it close to 10 times before I was felt comfortable with the structure and even then I was tweaking it (still am to some degree).

good luck

Frank, perhaps a compromise between Kirby's and your storage scheme?

Usually you wil retrieve images using searches, albums, or smart albums. However, I find myself quite often trying to locate projects, and not images. Browsing your library to track down a particulare project can be tedious, because you have to traverse a tree structure by expanding and collapsing folders. Your folders are the nodes of a tree structure, the projects are the leaves. The problem is, while you are navigation thru the nodes of the tree, searching the projects, you only will see the current folders/nodes you are expanding and have to guess which of these folders will contain the project you are lloking for. It is a problemvery similarto navigating the tree of menu items in a user interface. That is why I found the following guidelines helpful - at lest for my kind of library:

• The top level folders should be set up to collaps or reveal huge portions of your library with one click.
• The names of the intermediate folders should tell you easily at a glance which folder to click next, when you are diving into a nested structure of folders, so that you do not have to open all of them, if you are looking for a particular project.

It is up to you to decide, which naming scheme will serve you best to navigate quickly to a particular projects in your library tree.

I name my folders based on criteria that I can remember best. I usually know if I have travelled somewhere before or after a certain other event, that is why I like to have a temporal structure in the folder names. But my memory is very bad, if I need to know by heart the exact year and month of a certain shoot. So the locations are part of the folder names too - my projects are anchored in the space/time continuum. And I know the camera I used - if the project contains scans of paper prints or slides, or digital images.

Here is my library structure: a compromise between media kind, chronological order and thematic, location based events. One click can collaps or expand all scans or all digital images, one click can expand all sailing trips, biking tours, or family pictures, the vacation pictures are grouped chronologically.

Please, ignore my last post - that has been corrupted by Apple Maintainance work striking and killing the editor while I was still editing - not for the first time.😠 Perhaps I should move back to silicon valley or adjust my internal clock to California time...

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Frank, perhaps a compromise between Kirby's and your storage scheme? Both of your schemes have their strong points.

Usually you will retrieve images using searches, albums, or smart albums and not worry about projects. However, with my workflow, I find myself quite often trying to locate projects, and not only images, and Aperture offers only a poor support to find projects. You can search for them only indirectly by searching images inside the projects and thus hiding other projects.

Browsing your library to track down a particulare project can be tedious, because you have to traverse a tree structure by expanding and collapsing folders. Your folders are the nodes of a tree structure, the projects are the leaves. The problem is, while you are navigating the tree down from the root to the leafs, searching the projects, you will only see the current folders/nodes you are expanding and have to guess which of these folders will contain the project you are looking for. It is a problem very similar to navigating the tree of menu items in a user interface. That is why I found the following guidelines helpful - at least for my kind of library and workflow:

• The top level folders should be set up to collaps or reveal huge portions of your library with one click.
• The names of the intermediate folders should tell you easily at a glance which folder to click next, when you are diving down into a nested structure of folders, so that you do not have to open all of them, if you are looking for a particular project.

It is up to you to decide, which naming scheme will serve you best to navigate quickly to a particular project and to identify it in your library tree.

I name my folders based on criteria that I can remember best. I usually know if I have travelled somewhere before or after a certain other event, and that is why I like to have a chronological structure in the folder names. But my memory for absolute dates is very bad, if I would need to know by heart the exact year and month of a certain shoot to identify the project it would be difficult for me. The date alone as a folder name would not help me much. So the locations or events are part of the folder names too - my projects are anchored in the space/time continuum. And I know the camera I used - if the project contains scans of paper prints or slides, or digital images.

Here is my library structure: a compromise between media kind, event, chronological order and thematic, location based events. One click can collaps or expand all scans of paper prints or transparencies, or reveal all digital images, one click can expand all sailing trips, biking tours, or family pictures, the vacation pictures are grouped chronologically.

This is my private Aperture library, the library I use at work is very different, the work library is structured solely according to tasks: lectures and research projects, because I do not import shoots into that library, it contains computer graphics, satellite data, and derived products.

This structure is perfect for me, because for my workflow I need to access the folders as well as the images, for quite a few smart albums are directly attached to their corresponding projects, e.g. a screensaver album or a selection for a web gallery showing my wildlife pictures from Tanzania or the Galapagos islands will be defined locally and not globally.

And please excuse the screen shot in german - I did not want to rename my folders to english names just for a screen shot.

Cheers

Léonie

Just a quick reply to one point. I'll try to post more when I have more time to read your post in detail.

However, with my workflow, I find myself quite often trying to locate projects, and not only images, and Aperture offers only a poor support to find projects. You can search for them only indirectly by searching images inside the projects and thus hiding other projects.

You should experiment with the projects Info window. Whatever you place in the description of the project is searchable in the Library tab of the Inspector's each box.

So in this example:

the project description has the three terms Harpo backyard spring and when I enter backyard in the search box you see this project is displayed. Now I have a bunch of images with the keyword Harpo so you can see this search is specific to the project it isn't looking at the keywords in the images.

The Info window for the selected project can be displayed by hitting shift-I so you don't need to be in Projects view to get at it.

Thank you Frank,

I'll explore that venue, that does sound promising. Sofar I could not discipline myself to fill in that kind of information in a systematic way, my project data are rather random 😊.

Do you have a strategy how to make the most of these tags?

Cheers

Léonie

Think of adding these 'tags' to projects in the same way that you think of adding metadata to images, just on a higher level.

Personally I don't use it a lot, in fact I had moved this knowledge to the back of my mind until your post explaining how you have trouble finding projects brought it back to the front. I think for someone who does search for projects this adds a bit to simply searching for a project name but as you wrote you need to be disciplined.

After trying it out for the post here I really see some potential for it. I always looked a the project description as a sentence type of entry, lilke a caption, but using it for keywords would sem to me to make more sense. Between this and being able to add a place to a project it should make searching for projects a lot easier. Perhaps this is what the developers had in mind for project searching all along.\

regards

Thanks a lot, Frank.

You are right, my project descriptions are more like captions right now, but I will try to change that to a consistent tagging style.

regards