How I Organize Pictures in Aperture

First of all I’ll credit the following sites with ideas I used when putting together this article.

OutDoorEyes.com
UseFilm.com
tjotala.com
but especially speirs.org

Organization Requirements

When I set out to design a comprehensive organizational structure within Aperture, I realized I had some requirements that other articles I’d read hadn’t really addressed. I've published them here on the off chance that someone else might have similar needs and find these thoughts useful.

Workflow and Laziness

The organization needed to take into account that every time I import pictures I don't always have time to "organize" them. I found I needed some sort of inbox to just dump images in until I'm able to process them. This lets me quickly clean images off of my camera before heading out without having to spend time right there organizing things.

Exporting

The workflow and organization also needed to handle the times when I export images. I need to track the different types of exporting I end up doing. Knowing what you've exported is handy because if you ever need to back up the images you've exported to a web site or given to a client, it's helpful to be able to recreate that export action should you need to in the future. It's also nice to see what items you've exported to different areas in one place, for example it’s nice to reference all the pictures I’ve exported to flickr.com.

Deciding on Highest Organization Level

While projects are the main organizational tool in Aperture, you still need a method for organizing all the individual projects. Aperture allows you to create folders which can then contain projects. I decided these folders would be the highest organizational level.

When thinking about this however, I thought I might create folders for the different kinds of projects like Movie Stills, Street photography, abstracts, etc. The problem with this type of organization is that the information contained in the folder name overlaps the keyword information. Keywords or tags provide an arbitrary scheme for adding metadata to an image so it's searchable. Keywords and tags have their own issues which need to be addressed, but those issues aren’t solved by using keyword-like terms when defining folders.

Another option for folders would be to use an iPhoto style of organization. That's where a project (roll) is created every time you dump images into the computer. This has the same problem as the folders above because you usually end up giving the folder a name like "Walk in the Park". Well, which park and then what about the last 4 frames that are of your cat and not in the park?

The method I settled upon for top level organization is to organize by date. This provides a non-arbitrary definition and avoids any long internal debates or confusion about what folder a particular photograph belongs in. Unless of course I shot the stuff on actual film. I don't always know the exact date of all the photos on a roll so I treat these slightly differently. I just make the assumption that they were all taken the day that I scan the contact sheet into Aperture. If I have more details notes with actual date information then I’ll key that in, otherwise this approximation works fine for film. Another potential problem using this method occurs when I import a bunch of pictures and most of them are from March but 2 are from April. I then have to do some extra (although potentially minimal) amount of work to sift out those two and put them in the correct month. However Aperture can do that for me automatically. I can create smart albums that draw a firm line between dates which puts things where they belong.

As an amateur photographer I do a lot more wondering around snapping pictures and then uploading them at sort of random schedules. I might go a month without uploading the images from a card. I might do it once a day for a week. Therefore giving each import a name does not fit the way I take pictures. A high level organization that is totally objective was the easiest to implement Using dates as the highest level of organization is nice because of the non-arbitrary nature of the folder names.

At the moment my folders look like this:

If I had more pictures I’d have a sub folder for each month. For now, a sub folder for each quarter of the month works just fine.

Defining a Project

Projects are the main individual organizational tools in Aperature. Therefore, deciding on what a project contains is an important decision. Is a project a shoot, a span of time, an event? It could be all kinds of things. They key to a good organizational system in Aperture is deciding on a few simple rules and sticking to them. However, as an amateur photographer I sometimes find it's difficult to define a "shoot" or a "project". I take my camera out with me and I might shoot something or I might not. Then after a few days or weeks I'll import the pictures into Aperture. Other times I do actually work on a project or a bigger shoot so my organizational scheme has to work for both types of shoots. That meant when defining what a project was to consist of I it had to fit my rather unfocused style of randomly taking pictures around town. It also had to be easy to remember and easy to use.

To deal with my two different styles of taking pictures I define a project as a “shoot”. That means as I’m sorting pictures in my Review folder I create projects for pictures taking as part of an assignment, event, trip, etc. If I have a bunch of pictures that don’t really fit into one category, I create a project named "Snapshots". This ends up holding the miscellaneous pictures I take just wondering around. If it's for a roll of actual film, the name of the project is the roll information.

To simplify working with the dates on a single upload spanning an arbitrary timeframe, the date used for placing the project within a folder is the date of import, not the date of the picture was actually taken. The date of the pictures can always be sorted via some fancier date routine using EXIF data, smart folders or the default library browser.

Each project can contain albums, folders, smart albums etc to then help organize pictures within the projects if needed.

Special Collections

Another top level folder is the "Collections", “Special Collections” and “xMaintenance” folders. The Collections folder holds searches that seek to collect photos according to their categories and for other purposes. Totally arbitrary searches result in some photos ending up in multiple searches, which is the power of tags / keywords. Each item within a collection references something in a project under the date based folders. No projects are stored under the Collections folder.

Special Collections are for photos that weren't taken by me or fit outside of the general organizational parameters. For example, a project to contain tear sheets, photos from my parents, licensed photos, etc.

Finally the “xMaintenance” folder holds searches I create when performing maintenance on my photo database.

Keywords

Using Keywords is another powerful method for creating arbitrary searches. A comprehensive keyword strategy goes hand-in-hand with the folder/project’s organization methods in Aperture. However I’ll outline my keywords strategy in another article.