Go DSLR…bringing Digital Photography to the masses

Working with any Digital Asset Management Platform (DAMP) like Aperture 3, Lightroom 3 and others is, in my opinion, a one way street.  The problem is also as you fill your database with photos, it becomes more difficult to make changes retroactively. Because of this, it is best to set up your DAMP the way you want from the very beginning. Since I chose Aperture 3 I will go through the power of Aperture in any respect over a four part article. This is part 1:Basics. Essentially we will go through all the basics and presets you can set in order to automate importing and organizing your Photo library in the best way.

This article is part of a series and will be available as a PDF download when completed.
The parts are:

• Part 1: The basics
• Part 2: Importing – Import presets
• Part 2.5: File Referencing – Master files
• Part 3: Key-wording, Metadata and Smart Albums
• Part 4: Advanced Topics for power users
• Part 4.5: Customizing Apple Keyboard shortcuts
• Part 5: Conclusion, reflection and review

Please be aware that we will be using an example library in this series with very few photos. This guide is designed for you to pick the parts you want and implement them in your own workflow. However, let’s get started with the basics first.

1. Create a new Library

In order to start as cleanly as possible, we create a new library by clicking on FILE -> SWITCH TO LIBRARY -> OTHER/NEW.. You will then get a window where you have a list of all your libraries or a button called NEW. Clicking this button will prompt you to enter a name for your library and then Aperture will load that library.  We call ours Aperture_Demo.

A word about library management in Aperture 3. It is easy to switch libraries and as such it is tempting to organize your photos even based on libraries. This is fine if you have recurring clients or wnat to organize by year, for example. The caveat in this however is that you cannot search or browse your other photos unless you switch to the library which could be a problem if you want to list all your photos based on a keyword. Only the photos in your current library will be listed.

This method of organizing of course decreases the memory usage as you load less images but it can easily bypassed by using referenced files , which we will go over next.

2. References, Projects, Albums and Folders

A lot of ground to cover in this. Aperture 3 allows you to organize your photos in many ways and this can be quite confusing. Basically a Folder is just that, a folder where you can store other things in. The same goes with Projects. A project in Aperture 3 is not just a collection of photos. Let’s take the example of a multi day shooting or a vacation. You can create a project and name it Vacation or Shooting for client X. Now within this project you can have a folder for each day and import your photos there. You can then create a album or smart album and have automatically all photos your gave a certain rating or keywords added in that album. This might sound daunting but imagine a full year of events and shootings or many vacations and weekends. If you don’t organize them, THAT is daunting.

Now, many people just import their photos into the Aperture library and be done with it. Aperture does a great way of organizing the files internally and it will not destroy your master files.Great. But your library grows in immense size over time. You have to count your RAW files and preview images. This can easily go over several hundred gigabytes. Of course if you choose to back your images up with Vaults (More on this in the fourth part), you are save and everything is in order. The only problem is slowdown over time. Also your Mac’s resources, especially RAM, will be used much more.

In this situation referenced files will come to the rescue. Reference files means that you have your OWN folder structure somewhere on your hard-drive where your RAW and original files are stored and only the work files are in the Aperture 3 library. This means your library is small, tiny in comparison and fast. The other benefit is that your library becomes mobile. My library with over 20000 photos is 8GB in size. in comparison the whole library was over 120G before I referenced files and I had the library split up in three. Now, if you are working on a laptop, your portable hard-drive space is limited and you don’t wnat to carry everything with you all the time. Instead yo can have your library with you and your master files save at home. This approach also has a drawback: You need to back your masters up separately. This is where Apple’s Time Machine comes in very handy. In our articles we are choosing the reference method as it is the most flexible and clean method.

In order to work with these articles, create a folder somewhere called APerture3_Masters in Finder, not in Aperture 3.

Now that we have the locations for the reference files, understand the basics of projects folders and albums and have a library ready to be used, let’s move on to Part 2: Importing!