It is no secret that I am a fan of all things Apple. I have at some point owned nearly every product line Apple has made in the last 10 years. It is also no secret that since 2008 I have been using Aperture for all my photo management and adjustments. To move back to PC (and therefore Adobe Lightroom) whilst not impossible would be a time consuming and tedious project.
However, Aperture interacting with the iPhone and iPad was not something I thought particularly hard about up until the last 6 months, by which point my library structure in Aperture is causing some pain. Seriously, it has taken me three years to realise how I should be using the library as opposed to how I am. This is going to be a lengthy post about all things Aperture Library.
My Current Library
I think the best way to look at this is to show you my current library. It looks a little bit like as you see on the left and generally all the sections in the library follow this format.
In the past, as I do not actually take that many photos in a year, the best thing to do seemed to be to sort everything into a date format structured by folders. If there was a particular set of photos I had taken, I would create a manual album for them.
You’ll note that the albums have a year date next to them. Theres a reason for this – and quite simply it is a case of having far too many albums to be able to easily identify them on the iDevice.
And as it turns out, my concept of albums and projects is flawed. This is particularly apparent when you start looking at the photos on an iPad.
The image to the left show the Event window, which appears as a cluttered pile of projects with ambiguous names – “2 April – June” which year? The Albums folder is a slightly more organised version of events where I at least know the year and what the photo set is.
Albums and Projects – The Future
Lets start with Projects. Projects are the ‘Events’ seen on iDevices and in iPhoto. What they should be used for is the collection of photos relating to one particular event. They should also have a distinctly unique name within your library. They should also not be so long that you need to scroll the screen in AP3 or open the project on the iDevice to work out the photos. This is something I now plan on going back to my collection and doing.
Example of project names:
- Taiwan-2011
- SnugFalls-2009
This is de-emphasise the date of the project whilst still giving me an indication of when the photos were taken
As for albums, these would appear to be used to create a specific subset of photos from a project, or selection of projects. As people know who read this blog know, I like taking photos of waterfalls, so in this case I will had use AP3′s Smart Albums to generate a “Waterfall” Album from my library. Similarly it may be good to put together a “Family” Album.
Albums now appear to be an abstraction from projects and a way to get similar genres of photos together, which is a step away from the contemporary “Heres my photo album from this location” concept. It also mean I will get away from developing a naming scheme for albums as I will now have fewer albums, with more general, discrete names
Conclusion
So as you can see, making the decision to care about how the data in the Aperture library is stored can make a significant impact to how it syncs with iDevices. It is only now that I have decided to car enough to investigate it to realise how I should be using Aperture, and as a result another piece of the puzzle goes into place in my quest for data management. Hopefully people will find this information useful.
One of these days I will complete my post of AP3 Metadata. Metadata has been another dark art to me but something that is gaining in importance with large digital libraries.
