Smart Albums
I use the smart album feature of Aperture to create the galleries on this site. Here is the top of my projects list:
The Library item includes predefined (and fixed) smart albums. It has star ratings that only includes one and five stars, so I added three more covering two, three, and four stars or better. Clicking on the little magnifying glass next to 3 stars or better brings up this settings window:
Note the heading. It says (Library). That means that its scope is the entire library. It will find all images with a rating greater or equal than three stars whether or not they are in a stack across all projects in the library. Although I have it at the top level of the library, I could drag that smart album anywhere and it would work the same way. A duplicate would do the same.
I have my gallery smart albums organized into a blue folder. They can live anywhere, but this was a nice central place to put them. I have put spaces before some of the names I have used, because Aperture arranges things strictly alphabetically. One space will sit at the top of a list. Two spaces will sit above that, etc.
Everything I want to show in the gallery I keyword with Bagelturf Gallery. I have a keyword set called Actions that I use to select which images I want to appear in which gallery and which I want as (metaphorically mixed) wallpaper on my desktop. The Macros smart album picks out images I have tagged as Macro for their type. Rejects just looks for ratings of X.
To export to a gallery I select the gallery smart album, sort by image date, select the images I have recently added, and export either the masters or the versions to a local folder. Then I fire up Photosite Timesaviour and regenerate the gallery folder locally. That done and checked, I start Transmit and use its synchronizing feature to make the .Mac version of the gallery look like the local one. By exporting only the new images and syncing I save a great deal of uploading.
Why not use the Aperture gallery feature? It is just not flexible enough. In particular I cannot have a three-level gallery where the third level is the original. Also there is no Home button to let me go back to the main gallery index page I have set up.
When I export images destined for the Canon S3 gallery, I export masters and use a preset export called Gallery:
This helps me remember how I did the export last time. Clicking on the Export Preset pop up list and selecting Edit... allows me to choose the export file format:
In this case I have a custom export that just uses the version name. In that way, any image that goes to the gallery can have a meaningful name and I can use that name in the thumbnail page. The Subfolder Format pop-up works the same way, allowing me to structure the exported files if I wish.
The other use for smart albums is in collecting images automatically with a scope that is smaller than the entire library. The smart albums I have shown so far were created with the Library selected, and they reference the whole library. Nice, but slow, and often not what is wanted.
I have a blue folder that contains all my projects for 2006 called, unsurprisingly, 2006. If I select that it shows me the contents of all the projects inside it. If I create a new Smart Album with that Blue Folder selected then I get this:
Its scope is all the projects inside the 2006 blue folder. I can now set up all the options I need and close it and it will always reference just those projects that are in the 2006 blue folder. If I add more projects it will find those too. And it will be faster than a library-wide smart album. And this works at any level in the blue folders and at the project level.
Here is one for my June 2006 project that lives inside the 2006 blue folder:
The joy does not extend to brown folders, however. If you select anything inside a project and create a new smart album, then the smart album is created where you selected, but its scope is always the enclosing project. Still, this is not too shabby.
The moral therefore is to use small projects for speed, and large blue folder hierarchies to support browsing and smart albums.
The Library item includes predefined (and fixed) smart albums. It has star ratings that only includes one and five stars, so I added three more covering two, three, and four stars or better. Clicking on the little magnifying glass next to 3 stars or better brings up this settings window:
Note the heading. It says (Library). That means that its scope is the entire library. It will find all images with a rating greater or equal than three stars whether or not they are in a stack across all projects in the library. Although I have it at the top level of the library, I could drag that smart album anywhere and it would work the same way. A duplicate would do the same.
I have my gallery smart albums organized into a blue folder. They can live anywhere, but this was a nice central place to put them. I have put spaces before some of the names I have used, because Aperture arranges things strictly alphabetically. One space will sit at the top of a list. Two spaces will sit above that, etc.
Everything I want to show in the gallery I keyword with Bagelturf Gallery. I have a keyword set called Actions that I use to select which images I want to appear in which gallery and which I want as (metaphorically mixed) wallpaper on my desktop. The Macros smart album picks out images I have tagged as Macro for their type. Rejects just looks for ratings of X.
To export to a gallery I select the gallery smart album, sort by image date, select the images I have recently added, and export either the masters or the versions to a local folder. Then I fire up Photosite Timesaviour and regenerate the gallery folder locally. That done and checked, I start Transmit and use its synchronizing feature to make the .Mac version of the gallery look like the local one. By exporting only the new images and syncing I save a great deal of uploading.
Why not use the Aperture gallery feature? It is just not flexible enough. In particular I cannot have a three-level gallery where the third level is the original. Also there is no Home button to let me go back to the main gallery index page I have set up.
When I export images destined for the Canon S3 gallery, I export masters and use a preset export called Gallery:
This helps me remember how I did the export last time. Clicking on the Export Preset pop up list and selecting Edit... allows me to choose the export file format:
In this case I have a custom export that just uses the version name. In that way, any image that goes to the gallery can have a meaningful name and I can use that name in the thumbnail page. The Subfolder Format pop-up works the same way, allowing me to structure the exported files if I wish.
The other use for smart albums is in collecting images automatically with a scope that is smaller than the entire library. The smart albums I have shown so far were created with the Library selected, and they reference the whole library. Nice, but slow, and often not what is wanted.
I have a blue folder that contains all my projects for 2006 called, unsurprisingly, 2006. If I select that it shows me the contents of all the projects inside it. If I create a new Smart Album with that Blue Folder selected then I get this:
Its scope is all the projects inside the 2006 blue folder. I can now set up all the options I need and close it and it will always reference just those projects that are in the 2006 blue folder. If I add more projects it will find those too. And it will be faster than a library-wide smart album. And this works at any level in the blue folders and at the project level.
Here is one for my June 2006 project that lives inside the 2006 blue folder:
The joy does not extend to brown folders, however. If you select anything inside a project and create a new smart album, then the smart album is created where you selected, but its scope is always the enclosing project. Still, this is not too shabby.
The moral therefore is to use small projects for speed, and large blue folder hierarchies to support browsing and smart albums.
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