RB Design » Aperture Blue Folder

Aperture 2 Quick Tip – Project Notes

RB — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 00:39:38 +0000

A few weeks ago a question from a new Aperture users came up on the Apple Aperture Support forums. The question – “Is there any way to keep notes for a project as a whole” – sort of like meta data for the whole project. My instant reaction was no but another user posted an idea to use a web journal as a way to keep notes about the project. This is a great idea and I refined it a little bit and posted another response – How about using an aperture book as project notes. This is one of the things I really like about Aperture. No matter how much you use it there is always another way to use it that you may not have thought of. On that note I thought I would share a the book as project notes tip with you.

The first thing that I did was create a custom book layout. This step is not really required but I did it just for the heck of it. The reason it’s not required and probably superfluous to most Aperture users is because no matter how much I love Aperture books the one most annoying factor are the things that you can’t change or save as a book template. Things like page layouts, fonts, default pages, etc. You can change them – just not from Aperture – you need to edit the semi XML directly. Not a fun thing so I won’t dwell on it here but if anyone is interested in how to do anything you want with a book template/layout let me know and I’ll post an article sooner or later. So here is what I did.

After creating the custom layout I switched over to layout mode and designed the first cut of a page that I thought would be appropriate to use for notes on the project. I then saved this page layout as a new master page (another thing you can’t save directly to your “custom book layout” – It’s saved only to the actual book instance that you are currently working on). Next I proceeded to delete all of the default pages generated by Aperture so that only the page that I designed for project notes was in the book. I created this new book in a top level blue folder called “book layouts”, this is where I keep all of the books with page layout modifications that I use over and over – in other words the real custom layouts. You can take a look at the example screen shot at the top of the article if you would like to see what I am talking about. Now when you want to have a place to jot down some things related to a project, to-do lists, project ideas, inspiration, shots you still need, client instructions/requests, whatever – you have a great place to do it. All you need to do is open up your book layouts blue folder, right click, duplicate the project notes book, and drag it to the project. I would suggest you may want to investigate this organization technique for page layouts that you reuse for just about any book project as well.

The great thing about this is that you can add as many pages as you need. The other thing to remember is that you can put the book at any level of the Aperture organization hierarchy as you would like. Books are not restricted to living in projects. If you have a really big “project” that is contained in a series of project boxes under a blue folder you can put it at the top level of the blue folder. You can do the same thing with client notes, etc. You get the idea.

I don’t know about you but I am constantly writing things down on little pieces of paper, journals, pocket note books, and napkins regarding photography projects. I am hoping this turns out to be a great way of keeping all of those notes consolidated in one place with the actual images. I’ll let you know how it goes down the road.

Aperture Quick Tip – Blue Folders and Projects

RB — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 02:05:54 +0000

If you create a folder while clicked on the library (or another blue folder) you get a blue folder. You can group projects together inside a blue folder as well as other blue folders. That’s pretty evident but one of the other things that you can do is create other things like smart albums inside a blue folder that are not inside any one project. The really cool thing about smart albums in a blue folder is that the search criteria is restricted to only the projects that are also inside that blue folder. The same goes for searches in the browser. Try it. Drag a couple of your Aperture projects inside a new blue folder that you create and then click on the blue folder itself. You will notice that you will see all of the images inside all of the projects that are contained in the blue folder. If you do a search in the browser only images that are in projects contained in that folder show up. Nice.

I mentioned in the Aperture 2 Organization PDF that I use blue folders to group projects by genre in my Aperture library. Things like Family, Fashion, Portraits, Glamour, Experimental Projects, Events, etc. For commercial work I usually create a blue folder for each client under the main genre folder. Guess what projects go in there. The other thing that I use blue folders for is to follow some of my own advice regarding keeping project size relatively small. If I am working on an ongoing project that can span months or even a year or more, I usually will create a blue folder to represent the whole project. Inside that folder are housed the Aperture â€œprojectsâ€ that comprise the whole conceptual project. Pretty nifty.

The bottom line is that in addition to reducing the visual noise of tons of projects in the project inspector pane it also provides extremely useful context restrictions as well. If you are not using blue folders or are using them only for boring pedantic things like year, month, etc. try getting creative with them.

As usual iWeb/MobileMe comments are screwy so give me a shout at rwboyer@mac.com

Apple Aperture 2.1 Organization

RB — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 22:20:28 +0000

Update – This post was the original post from a discussion I had in the Apple support forum a long long time ago. I did put a free PDF together that was downloaded about 10,000 times. I had so many suggestions and questions that I decided to make a much larger more comprehensive version. It covers far far more and provides a ton of useful work-flow tips and examples on how to be extremely efficient. Even if you have been using Aperture for years you will probably find a lot of things in the new Organization eBook that you might not have even thought about. Sadly the new version is not free but I can tell you that I surveyed everything else out there and you will not find a better or more advanced discussion of Aperture’s organizational capabilities. Here is the link to the new illustrated more comprehensive Guide to Aperture 2 Organization eBook PDF:

Aperture eBooks

Oh one more thing – just because it is only five bucks doesn’t mean it’s not better than other way more expensive resources. It is – in most cases you will learn more from this guide than reading everything else out there in print and on the web. This is not a regurgitation of the Aperture documentation and this is not a book for dummies. Consider me an extremely value conscious Robin Hood.

Please leave comments with any feedback or email me here rwboyer@mac.com

The following is a snip of the original post describing the screen shot above.

Here is a description of a few things going on with this structure that may help clarify how one can use some of the grouping features of Aperture.

Note the blue folders – these can contain projects, other blue folders, and a few items that are usually found inside projects (smart albums etc.) I use these to group related projects and some items that are useful that are associated with the grouped projects.

Looking at the blue folder named “Glamour” you can see that there are a bunch of yellow project boxes in there, they are all individual studio sessions that I shot as promo material for lighting workshops that I do. There is also another blue folder inside of “Glamour” named “Albums”. Note that they do not “live” in a project at all. I am using those to group images of the same model that are in more that one project. There is also a purple smart album named “Rated” that lives at the top level of the “Glamour” folder. I am using this smart album to collect all of the images that have a rating of one star or above in all of the different projects under the “Glamour” folder. Since I created the smart album inside of the “Glamour” folder it is only going to collect images in projects under that folder, not everything in the library. This is a great way to limit the context of smart albums etc. with out making ridiculously complex search criteria or going back and redoing a bunch of keywording etc. One other note, There is a project in the “Glamour” folder named “Workshop” this project contains a couple of objects, namely Layout, Prints, and Workshop Book. This Workshop project contains NO image masters or versions but does contain pointers to masters/versions in other projects under “Glamour”. I use this project to contain a book and printed promo material that is derived from images that are in the rated smart album. Why is it in a project? So that I can export it as an Aperture project and import it to other Aperture libraries. Why do I have the static albums for each model? So I can keep a static order to the images and run a slideshow preset on them.

Onto another blue folder “Experimental Projects”, I am using this to group two projects that I was actually shooting today. If you look at the project “Ghost Ships” you can see yellow folders named “Albums” and “Light Tables”. Yellow folders are really simple, they exist only inside projects and are used to group and organize stuff inside projects. Here I am using them in an extremely simple way. One for my albums, one for some layout ideas on how different images play together. After I export the project and import it to my main library on my desktop workstation the population of yellow folders under that project will probably change quite a bit to group a bunch of different but related things together.

This is a very basic example of folders and projects. If anyone is interested at all I would be glad to put an illustrated PDF guide together that explains exactly how all of this stuff works in different contexts and workflows along with some ideas on how each feature from basic to advanced context tricks can be used effectively. Just leave a message here or hit me up on my email.

Finally had a chance to do some editing and corrected some typos and minor phasing.