Guest Post & Photos by Joseph Linaschke of ApertureExpert.com | Follow him on Twitter
(Did you miss parts 1 and 2? Start here. then read this.
Now that you’ve determined your strategy and structure, and you’ve been organizing old photos (and importing new ones) following your new system, you may want to get more granular on your organization—for some photos, at least.
ALBUMS
The easiest way to break a big project into bite-sized chunks it to create albums. Let’s say you took a long holiday and visited the beach, a museum, took a neighborhood tour, etc. It can be handy to separate those events, but not actually move them to different projects. This vacation was all one trip, or “project”, after all. So you can create an album for each sub-set, or event, or however you like to think of it, and put photos there. What’s great is that you will still see all the photos from that trip whenever you click on the trip project, but when you want to just see the photos from the museum for example, you can view only that album. The same photo can appear in multiple albums, too. Following the above example, you may have every photo in an event album, but then make another album called “best of” and just drag your favorites into there. They will still show up in the project and the original album, and also in the “best of” album.
KEYWORDS & SMART ALBUMS
If you want to get really specific, you can apply individual keywords to photos or groups of photos. Once those are applied, you can create complex search criteria to find exactly the photos you want. You can search on the fly, or create a Smart Album that will re-search your photos every time you click on it. It’s easy to create a search to find, for example, photos of trees or flowers shot in January with your Canon 5D Mk II and 50mm lens rated 3-stars or better that haven’t yet been printed.
As you can see, organizing your photos in Aperture can be as simple or as advanced as you like. The most important thing you can do is to follow a consistent strategy—whatever that may be. Even doing the basics, like naming the project intelligently and perhaps adding more info to the Project Info panel will ensure that you can find that picture of little Johnny under the Christmas tree – or that gotta-have-it-now old client photo – years and years from now.
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