Rate Your Photos

Step 1 right after I import in my images after a shoot is I rate my photos. I try and keep a consistent rating scale when I go through my photos (see below). I'll go into Full Screen Mode (F) and keep my fingers on the number keys. They correspond to the ratings (1-5).

★★★★★ : This photo is perfect out of the camera. It absolutely needs to be delivered.

★★★★ : This photo is pretty good. It might need some post-processing, but it most likely will be delivered.

★★★ : This photo is ok. It's on the line. I'll need to look at it a few times before I decide whether or not to deliver it. It will most likely need some post-processing before being delivered.

★★ : This photo is not that good, but it might be good to somebody else. I'm keeping it in the library in case I need filler.

★ : This photo is not good. I will most likely delete this photo after I've delivered the shoot.

As I go through the pictures, I'm also not shy about hitting the 9 key to reject a photo. These are the blurry, out of focus, random photos that I wouldn't show anybody. I'll use reject instead of delete at this point because delete takes longer. It's faster to just reject and then batch delete all the files at a later date.

I wouldn't recommend only selectively rating your photos. When you do that, you are basically saying that all the photos that you are NOT rating are not worthy to be rated. In that case, you might as well reject them since you don't plan on using them. By rating all of your photos, you are also making sure that you've gone through and at least looked at all of your photos.

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Organizing My Photos (Part III)

I'm a MacBook Pro kind of guy. That means I have limited hard drive space and I take my Aperture library with me wherever I go. The trick is, I don't take it all with me when I go. That's where Relocate Masters and Consolidate Masters come in. Whenever I'm done working on a project, I relocate my masters to an external drive. It moves my masters out of my library but leaves the previews and metadata on my MacBook Pro's hard disk drive. Now the downside of relocating is that whenever I want to go back and edit that project, I need to be connected to the external drive. That's where Consolidate Masters comes in. With that external drive connected, I can bring those masters back into my library and weigh down the HDD. Another problem with relocating is that since the masters are no longer in the library, they don't get backed up into the Vault. So I make it a point of regularly backing up that external masters drive. Besides backing it up to two separated RAID drives in two separate locations (I'm OCD. I know.) I also burn every image to an optical backup. When I relocated my masters, under Subfolder Format I choose: Image Year/Month/Day. Then when I back up, I just select as many months as can fit on a disc. This keeps my optical discs in relatively tidy order. Since I named all my files, then it's also easy to find for what I'm looking.
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Organizing My Photos (Part II)

When I import my files (or at least soon after using Batch Change), I rename my files so that I can find my files when I'm not using Aperture. It also makes the files a lot more meaningful than IMG_3728. Here's the format that I use: YYYYT_NAME_X.

• YYYY = Year
• T = Type of shoot (more on that below)
• NAME = Something meaningful to me. If I shoot a wedding, it's usually the name of bride
• X = Index #. It starts at one.

For the type of shoot, I use a bunch of single alpha codes to designate the shoot.

• P = Portrait
• W = Wedding
• C = Commercial Job. Usually for stock photos or some other request that doesn't involve people.
• D = Photowalk Days
• E = Event. At parties or whenever I'm just out and about, it's usually an event of some sort.
• Y = Yelp Event (yes, I shoot enough of these for it to warrant its own code)
• V = Vacation photos. Look. Everybody has them. Might as well call them out.
• S = Snapshots. Usually stuff on my P&S. Just random stuff. Generally stuff that's not particularly important to me.
• T = Experimental/Test. Whenever I'm trying out some new technique or toy, I tag these photos with T. They're usually of pretty low value but entertaining nonetheless.

So in my screenshot, my example is 2008P_Snuggles_1. In 2008, I did a portrait session with Snuggles (the Yorkie) and that's the first photo in the series.

Unless you renamed your files on import, when you run the Batch Change ⇧⌘B Aperture doesn't rename the files it only renames the Version. To get Aperture to rename the files, Relocate Masters and in the Name Format drop down, select Version Name. Then Consolidate Masters to get the files back into your Library.

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Organizing My Photos (Part I)

How you organize photos is all a matter of personal preference, but here's the way I do it and it works for me (most of the time). I have folders for every year. For every shoot, it's its own project. I label each of those projects, "MM-DD Name." For example, 06-15 Farmer's Market or 10-12 Fleet Week. Since all those are in the annual folder, I can usually jump to a particular shoot pretty quickly. When I do a shoot or have an event that spans multiple days, I put each day or each major piece of the event (for example, each day of a vacation or each location) in its own project. Then all those projects sit inside of a folder with the first date of the shoot as its title. For example, 05-12 Hawaii. Then that folder sits inside the annual folder. If I was more prolific as a photographer, I would probably have both annual and month folders. But I'm not. So the annuals work fine for me. Another benefit to using projects and folders in this fashion is that clicking on the folders will give you a thumbnail view of all the pictures contained within the folder.

Why projects instead of folders and albums?

Well for one, you have to start with a project to get your files into Aperture. And that oh so convenient feature of clicking on a folder to see all the children photos doesn't work. So if you started out with one project then made folders of albums within that project, you won't be able to see the aggregated thumbnails. Sorry!

The thing about projects is that they are the basic units of import/export by Aperture. If you control click, you'll find a bunch of features tailored to projects. So if you kept everything in one giant project, some export/relocate/consolidate functionality will be really hampered. I'll get into how I manage my files later and I depend heavily on relocating and consolidating photos.

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