Making best use of projects, folders, and albums

Ben,

have you looked at Kirby Krieger's user tip?

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

For example, an image can be in only one project, but can be in multiple albums while in that project.

• Pojects are the basic longterm storage structure - an image needs to be stored somewhere, and only once. That is, why an image and all its different versions are contained in one project. I have basically one project for each occasion - I create a new project, each time I download new images to Aperture, and related projects are grouped by folders. A typical folder with images taken during a holiday trip would have a project for each day of taking pictures at different stations of the journey.
• Albums are your own shortterm retrival structure. You group you images differently for different purposes, depending on how you want to use them. The same image can have different uses at the same time, so it can be used in different albums. For example, a photo showing an orchid in Peru would go ino three albums: an album of Peru images, an album of flowers, and album of my latest trip to Peru. I also group my albums by folders - a folder of travel albums, a folder with thematic albums (flowers, lighthouses, vulcanos, wildlife,etc.), a folder with family albums, a folder with albums used for teaching, for research, for testing.
• Many of my albums are smart albums. Rather than adding photos manually to albums, I tag them with keywords, places, faces, and ratings, and they will be added to the corresponding albums automatically. My keywords have different flavors - there are keywords for categories (flowers, animals,landscape, buildings), for different uses (screensaver, web, books, iPad), for the technical quality (the camera or scanner, the kind of processing of raytraycing). So my album for my screensaver of lighthouse pictures would be based on the keywords _Screensaver, building:lighthouse, *****.

Albums I sync to my iPad are also smart albums, and are not grouped with the projects but in a separate folder and also smart albums. I only sync the albums with 5* images for specific topics to the iPad. wildlife pictures, flower pictures, birds, some family meetings, travel albums.

Regards

Léonie

This is what I do. Even after years I find it useful and flexible -- it has met all my needs.

Another program (Devon Think) I looked at recently used the term "replicant" in contrast to "copy". Copies are actual second instances, separated from each other (changes to one do not effect the other). Replicants are duplicates of the original instance, and linked to it in such a way that any changes to the original _or the replicant_ show for every replicant.

I mention this because I think Aperture (and other programs) would benefit from making this same distinction. So your Original Version and adjusted Versions reside in Projects, while Albums (of any kind: regular, Book, Light Table, etc.) display _replicants_ of your Versions.

Replicants are duplicates of the original instance, and linked to it in such a way that any changes to the original _or the replicant_ show for every replicant.

I am starting to like your replicants, Kirby, even if the word is sounding to me somewhat ominous and sinister. 😀

I am more committed to _having_ a word, than to that particular word. German is excellent at naming things. Is there a word in German that works? In English, "replica" is an actual word and doesn't have the sinister overtones that wrap "replicant", but it is a close synonym for "copy" which makes it undesirable.

Assuming there _isn't_ a word for these ... things ... I find it notable. It's a new concept of the digital age. We _need_ a word for it.

In English, the best known word I can find is "facsimile" ... which isn't well-enough differentiated from "copy". Reaching far, one could use "eidolon" ... but no-one knows what it means, so one might as well create a new word.

Pressed to come up with an existing word, I would settle on "revenant". It contains the germ of the idea, which is an eerie re-appearance of an original.

Perhaps our Aperture community can do better 😀 .