jfaughnan wrote:
I've recently migrated from iPhoto to Aperture.
In iPhoto Apple made it very convenient to create create and manage Events (Aperture Projects). I used to create a lot of Albums, but iPhoto Events were so well done I created fewer Albums.
Now I'm working in Aperture. It's management of Projects/Events is nowhere near as sophisticated as iPhoto's features. I'm shifting back to working with Albums.
To ease that transition I'm looking for an AppleScript that will create one album for every Aperture Project.
Suggesting that iPhoto is more sophisticated seems wrong to me, but I really have always used Filemaker then Aperture so I am not an iPhoto expert.
Aperture facilitates keywords and Albums as very powerful tools. To specifically answer your question, just keyword a whole Project, part of a Project or just one image; you can make an Album Name a keyword. Then do a Find on that keyword to create an Album if you like. The keyword lives with the image file but the Album can be deleted if you like and recreated at any time in a few seconds.
I realized there's another way to manage the Event to Album transition.
In Aperture folders can hold Events and Albums alike. In iPhoto they can't mix.
So I can mix the two in my organizational structure, thereby eliminating the need to create additional Albums for the existing Projects/Events.
IMO organizational structures that over-use Folders are what I call Folder-think, and should be avoided in favor of database-think. Try to use keywords and Albums as much as possible in your organizing in lieu of folders. Save folders for aggregating: as per Léonie "use a folder to organize the bits and pieces - the different shoots, books, lighttables, slideshows."
Consider a Project to be like a roll of film like Léonie suggested; organizationally that is the only location that the images live in. Personally I set 500 as my arbitrary maximum number of images in that roll-of-film-Project. Experiment to see what number of maximum images in a Project may or may not slow your workflow down.
My boilerplate on organizing in Aperture:
First, Projects should be just that: individual-shoot (i.e. time) based projects rather than some kind of organizing tool for all the architectural photos or whatever. For performance reasons personally I keep each Project under 500 20-MB images, making a second Project if the shoot is large (e.g.
110829_KJones_Wed_A,
110829_KJones_Wed_B,
110829_KJones_Wed_C).
One or more albums will always organize the KJones wedding pix together anyway. All three Projects (110829_KJones_Wed_A, 110829_KJones_Wed_B, 110829_KJones_Wed_C) would have the keyword "KJones_Wed" applied to each pic, which allows an Album "KJones_Wed" to be quickly created at any time.
Folders are indeed flexible organizational tools but IMO often overused. Folders can effectively hide contents from view and therefore require users to remember how folders are nested and what is inside them. Folders were the only way to deal with single-original film, but are IMO limiting to image database thinking.
The way I look at it conceptually:
Aperture is a database (DB), and each image file lives in one Project.
Albums are just collections of Pointers that point to individual image files living in one or more Projects. Since they just contain pointers, albums can be created or deleted at will without affecting image files. Very powerful. And Albums of pointers take up almost zero space, so they are fast and do not make the Library size grow.
Keywords can be applied to every image separately or in batches. Keywords are hugely powerful and largely obviate the need for folders. Not that we should never use folders, just that we should use folders only when useful organizationally - - after first determining that using keywords and albums is not a better approach.
As one example imagine the keyword "flowers." Every image of a 100,000 images Library that has some flowers in it has the keyword flowers. Then say we want to put flowers in an ad, or as background for a show of some kind, or to print pix for a party, or even just to look for an image for some other reason. We can find every flower image in a 100k-image database in 2 seconds, and in another few seconds create an Album called "Flowers" that points to all of those individual images.
Similarly all family pix can have a keyword "family" and all work pix can have a key word "work." Each individual pic may have any number of keywords. Such pic characteristics (work, family, flowers, etc.) should not be organized via folders.
So by using keywords and albums we can have instant access to every image everywhere, very cool. And keywords and albums essentially take up no space in the database.
Another approach is to use a folder "Family" for family pix, a folder "Flowers" for flowers pix and another folder "Work" for work pix. IMO such folders usage is a very poor approach to using an images database (probably stemming from old paper or film work practices). Note that one cannot put an image with family in a field of flowers at a work picnic in all three folders; but it is instant with keywords.
HTH
-Allen
