I've been doing a lot of reading but am now wanting some guidance if anyone can help as to how best to organise my images in the Aperture library as I'm getting bogged down with everything.
I do a lot of photographic work with Plants for my website and would like Plants organised into sections on Wild Flowers, Trees, Shrubs, Climbers, Garden and House Plants, Fruit and Vegetables, Grasses, Ferns etc etc. within each of these sections I will have photos of specific plants; so my question is should the main category 'Plants' be a File or a project and is it better to put the categories of Wild Flowers etc. into Projects or into Folders and do the individual plants go into albums? I think I am making it a lot of hard work for myself worrying just about how to organise them all.
Helen
First off just give up on the idea of folders. It will not work. In fact that is the whole point of Aperture so you don't have to bother with folders.
When yo import the images first create a new "project". A project can be anything you want, one days shooting or all the work you do for one client. Basicaly it is some kind of "work unit" Maybe it is a bunch of shots you did of a product for a catalog. So place the new images into soe project, either create a new one or into an on-going project.
Next step: This is the most importent one. Adds "meta data" tags and captions. You need to invent a system of keywords. I use two sets of keywords (I do some underwater photography) One set defines the type of image, as close up, landscape portrait, abstract. It is kind of an art to choose the right number of keywords. You don't want to have to remember 1,000 of them and four is to few. Write down your definition of each one. The other set of keywords define the subject and loaction. And I use a lot of these. each image is tagges with a general subject type like "fish" or my daughter's name. Then other words to be more specific like the species of fish. Normally I can select the entire batch of images and tag them all at once for location. Again I use a general place like "underwater" and then a specif one like "Wreck of the Avalon, Torrance, CA"
One you have tags organization is nearly triveal and you can change you mind frequency without making much re-work. Use "smart folders". place smart folder inside normal folders. And rememebr that an image can exist in MANY folders at the same time (but is on the disk only once) This is the key. You make a smart folder by enterring a search criteria like "Black Sea Bass, five stars" then any image of that secies that I have rated a "five" will automaticaaly be place in that folder. I might not even have any some the folder is empty but some day I might tage a photo like that and Aperure will then place that image in that folder.
That smart folder might go into a folder called "best fish portraits by speces".
I have antother that says ""best fish portraits by location" And this folder has smart folders that read like "five star fish in Hawaii", "five star fish in So. California",....
Of course the same images will be in multiple folders
For family shoots I do about the same and make a big folder called "vacations" and it will have smart folders that each select images based on dates when I was on some vacation.
Other smart folders pick ou the best landscape images by geophic area. It is easy to add more of these and I do NOT have to go through all 10,000 images and decide where to file each image. I don't "file" them I "tag" them.
For some reason many people when maybe don't understand the concept of 'search" still want control of which finder folder each image is in. They will go nuts as their is no possible way to ever get it "right". For example do you place the image of Mary taken in San Fransico in 1993 in the "Mary" folder or the "San Fransico" or do you file it by date? I say "all of the above" This is really nothing new. Public libraies have card files where each book has three or more index cards and they have multiple index files, so you can find a book by Author, title, subject or even publisher or date or whatever. Aperture lets you create and change index file in a whin in a couple seconds. -- if you added the tags
