In this latest installment of the Aperture 3 file management guide, we will look closer at metadata, keywords and why you should use them. These are difficult concepts for newcomers as the benefits are not immediately apparent, especially if you have traditionally worked with folders to organize your data.
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 5: Customizing Apple Keyboard shortcuts
- Part 6: Conclusion, reflection and review
1. Metadata basics
If you have been reading on the internet in the past few years and have used blogs and websites such as Go-DLR.com you will have stumbled across metadata already. The traditional way of organizing files and even webpages was to catagorize them and put them in a folder that described the category. For example, traditionally, we would have taken 100 shots of a sunset and they would all be in the folder called “sunsets”. Now, shots from Mexico that contain a sunset would have been either duplicated or either in “Mexico” or in “sunsets”. Along comes metadata to save the day, and in actuallity metadata has been around much longer already. Metadata is data that relates to the file that it is contained in. For digital photography, the easiest example of metadta is EXIF data. This contains the camera mode, the focal length, shutter speed etc. Just look at some of the photos online and you will see that information (click on Image Info). By having all this information you might wonder if you can add to it and yes metadata can be just expanded upon and added to. There are so many metadata fields that you could describe every aspect of the file, the problem becomes then to be able to manage it and in some cases file size. Adobe is a very bad culprit in this. When you export with Adobe Lightroom or Adobe Photoshop, you get a ton of Adobe specific metadata. this can be avoided but it is on by default and the file is larger than if exported with Aperture 3.
The main purpose of metadata is, of course, file description or information. It allows us to know about the file, the type, other aspects and, what Aperture 3 is good at, classification of the file.
2. Metadata in Aperture 3
Basic metadata is read and represented in Aperture 3 extremely well. I would like to argue that it is one of the best platforms for using and making it easy to use metadata in ALL aspects. Take for example the camera, lens and image information. In Apertured 3, you can just click on the left side of the screen on the “Metadata” tab and voilá you have in a small rectangle on the top of the screen all the technical information about the shot nicely displayed. it ieven shows in your photos where the focus point was, if you click on the little focus icon!
Right below that little technical info you have a drop-down menu that lets you REALLY list all kinds of information that you did not know you had at your disposal. General is usually the best and quickest choice. You will notice that the EXIF Info shows you a ton of information but Aperture 3 will not show you the shutter accentuations (Shutter count) of the camera. Apple’s own Preview program, however only for Nikon cameras, will.
Now, you can see that the metadata is already extremely useful for regarding the photo. Gone are the days that photographers had to write everything down when they still exposed on film. This is nice, not new but nice. I say not new because since Digital SLRs became available, they always added at least part of this information into the file.
I mentioned that you can add to metadata and of course a lot of it is editable and for you to try out. The only things Aperture 3 won’t let you edit is the camera and lens information. Everything else is open. You can add the Copyright information, version, contact information and much more.
3. Keywords in Aperture 3 and why you want them
Earlier we discussed about classification and how we used to do this in folders and in Part 2;: Importing we still worked with folders and projects. But please notice one thing, we classified by day and by month. Which means that you have to know exactly what you did and shot every day if we would use the old way. Well now we will use the new way.
Keywords are like tags on the web. They describe several aspects of the photo. For example a sunset can be a sunset in Mexico and therefor be key-worded with sunset and mexico and the year, 2010. So you end up a photo with the following keywords: sunset, mexico, 2010 . This gives the photo now a “membership” in those groups. All your other photos that are key-worded (tagged) with “sunset” will all be members in this group. The keyword list of course grows as you add more photos. In my case the list is several hundred words long. Aperture will autocomplete as you type a keyword if it is in the database already as to avoid similarities like sunset and Sunset. These are two different words as keywords are case sensitive. Once you have keywords assigned to the photo you can make them display in the Aperture 3 view by simply hitting the Y key on your keyboard (the focus point display below was done by hitting the option or alt and F key).
Essentially you have your photos in a “folder” in your project but you are telling Aperture 3 that each photo also belongs to specific keyword groups. Now, if you are like me you have a lot of photos and you would like to classify all those, which is a lot of work. There are a few shortcuts but it still will be a lot of of work. Don’t worry, in the end, it is definitely worth it.
To add keywords to many photos at once.. which helps a lot and is actually quite fast, first click on the Photos list in your main window on the left hand side under the Library tab. Then select the BROWSER icon from the top menu bar and select your photos that belong in a certain group of key words by holding the COMMAND key and clicking on each photo. You can also select multiples by drawing a rectangle around them. Once you have them selected hit the following key combination: SHIFT, COMMAND, B This will open a Batch change window where you can enter keywords amongs a LOT of other things but that is what we focus here. Once you add them and click OK, they will be applied to ALL photos. Again, as you type, Aperture 3 will autocomplete as you can see in the screenshot.
Of course you can use different combinations and different keywords with each selection you make. Now that we have some keywords assigned, how about we use them?
4. Smart Albums and Metadata in Aperture 3
So now we have our photos keyworded and classified. great! So, how exactly does this make us and our like easier?
It’s called Smart Albums. They are like Albums within Aperture, so you can collect photos in them without moving those from their location except for one thing: They are built using metadata. You can create a smart album based on anything you like that you have in metadata. You can select by focal length, aperture value, specifc keywords, cameras, ratings and combine these even. So you can have a complex album that displays all sunset pictures in mexico, the united states and germany, that all have at least a 5 star rating and were shot at f11 with a 14 mm lens. While this might be overkill for most, ok 99%, of all people, it is possible and someone might use it.
We now will go through creating a smart album based on a lens, ratings and keywords.
1. Create a Smart album by right clicking in the Library and selecting New-> Smart Album.
2. Name your album and then focus on the left side where your selection process will start.
3. Select from the very first drop down menu : ALL and in the next one MATCH. This will create now a rule where all the criteria has to be matched by a photo in order to be included. You can also create the reverse or match ANY criteria.
4. Add from the drop-down menu on the right hand side a new rule called EXIF (select it from the menu, it will be added at the bottom.
5. Check the checkbox for Ratings. Next in the Ratings select “is greater or equal to” and then slide the slider to the right to increase the star rating you want your MINIMUM be. This means that any picture that has less than that selected rating will not be added, even though it might match the other criteria.
6. Now, check the EXIF check box at the very bottom. From the drop down menu that shows “Aperture” select LENS MINIMUM (mm) and from the next drop down menu: is. In the last field enter the value of the beginning zoom range of the lens you want to work with. In my case I will add 70 for my 70-200mm lens.
7. Lastly check the Keywords checkbox and select your keywords from the list. I will select sunflower and backyard. This will now automatically add all sunflower photos taken with my 70-200 lens and at least 4 star rating as you can see.
8. Close the selection with the small x in the top left corner of the floating window.If you want to adjust the album settings, simply click on the little search icon on the right hand side of the album name.
You now created a smart album. this means that any photo that matches the criteria anytime will be included or excluded if it does not. This means that if you now take a photo today and import it to aperture. If it was shot also with the same lens and keyworded the same and given at least a 4 star rating, it will show up in the album automatically. No work required. This allows you to have albums of your best shots ALWAYS ready or select shot from your family vacation instead of weeding through all of them when you want to show them off, you only show the best ones. Or go by client. This approach allows you to have all selected or best photos ffrom a client in the past and future in one place, anytime. It’s a great way to organize and you can create a folder in your library called Albums and add all smart albums there, be even more organized. The possibilities are endless!
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I found this extremely helpful. I could not find instructions that worked in the Aperture 3 help but this article did the trick. Thanks so much for the valuable tips.
I didn’t mention in my first comment that I was referring to the instructions for applying keywords to groups of files.
Hi Tim, glad it helped at least someone already. I find Aperture an awesome tool but the tutorials that contain a little bit more information than the basics are hard to come by or they want you to write the book.
//F
thank you! this is really really helpful!
Very helpful indeed.
Without such an article one may think the keywords are useless!