How do you find the images you want and omit the ones you don't?

You could click on the Library, select the All Images filter, and scroll through thousands upon thousands of them, clicking wildly as you see what you want:

But that is very slow. Instead, follow these four steps to getting to what you want.

Step One -- Narrow Your Scope

The first step to finding what you want is to narrow the scope to something less than the entire library. You can do that by selecting just one Project. Or if you are using Blue Folders to organize your Projects, one of those might be more appropriate:

But what if there are three projects that the images could come from and they are not in a Blue Folder? Or what if there are lots of other Projects in the Blue Folder that you don't want included? One way is to simply make a new Blue Folder and drag the three Projects into it. When you are done, return them to their proper place. Not very tidy, but it does work. Another way is to select the Blue Folder that encloses all the Projects you are interested in and narrow down to particular Projects later (more later on that).

A Smart Album is another way of reducing the scope. A Smart Album filters images that are inside whatever it was created in. So creating a Smart Album inside a Blue Folder will let you filter only the images in Projects it encloses. Creating one in the Library will filter the whole library. Either way, creating and using a Smart Album can substantially reduce the number of thumbnails shown. And Smart Albums can be saved, so you only have to create them once.

For example, if the scope were images in all Government projects in Brazil that were shot with a Canon camera and have a rating of three of more stars, I would create a Smart Album here:

and define it so:

By not ignoring stack groupings I am letting the pick of each stack stand in for all the images in that stack.

Step 2 -- Filter To What You Want To See

Now having reduced the scope, the second step is to filter the result of the first step. Although it does not advertise the fact, Aperture supports two levels of filtering. Smart albums or Project selection is the first level, and thumbnail filtering is the second level. Thumbnail filtering is done on the thumbnail viewer or the list viewer:

Click the filter button to bring up the dialog, enter text in the search field, or use the pop-up (triangle) to select a predefined filter.

The default dialog allows you to filter by rating just by dragging the control left and right:

You can also use the calendar to narrow down to specific days or ranges of days, filter by keywords, or select any number of import sessions:

The Match All/Any pop up on the top left gives an and/or selection to the filters that are listed. And the Keywords can have and/or selected too, using their pop-up.

The + button top right gives access to additional criteria and lets you use them as many times as you like. For instance:

This selects only images shot in January, March, April, May, or December, irrespective of year (note pop-up says Any). And remember, we are using this on top of the first-level of filtering provided by the Smart Album (Brazil, three star, Canon) that reduced the scope. As a reminder, the filter search box changes to show that filtering is active and uses three date filters:

You can add additional filters based on absolute dates, dates relative to now (three months ago, for example), specific hour, day, month, or year values (as above), EXIF, IPTC, text, rating, or other metadata, such as orientation or file size. Here is another example:

Despite this variety, there are things you cannot filter on. For example, you cannot directly filter on masters or versions. You cannot directly filter on where master or versions are stored, such as in particular Albums or Projects. You cannot filter on whether an image is stacked or not. You cannot filter on the number of versions it has. You cannot filter on whether and what type of adjustments have been made.

Step 3 -- Select What You Want To Use

The third and final step is a manual one: select the images you actually want to use. By now there should be a manageable number of thumbnails. To help your selection, sort them the way you want to see them. The sort criterion is shown in the pop-up on the thumbnail panel. Here, file size is selected:

The little triangle reverses the order. You can choose among: Image Date, Rating, Version Name, File Name, Keywords, File Size, Orientation, and Master Pixel Size. Custom is also an option, but is usually grayed out. That's because it only appears if you rearrange the thumbnails manually. If you are bold enough to select the list view (three line button on the left), then you can sort by any column:

including this one, all the way to the right:

That will let you sort on the Project that holds the master for each image in the list. So if you had to include Projects that you did not want to include in Step 1 above, this is how you identify them. What you cannot do is to sort on more than one column. And clicking columns in a special order does not have any effect on the final outcome.

Once you have the images sorted the way you want them, shift click to select ranges, command click to select individual images, alternate shift-clicking and command-clicking to select a range and then another disjoint range, command-drag to add regions of images, and many other shortcuts. You can also use command-R to reverse the selection.

Step 4 -- Use The Images You Have Selected

FInally, do whatever it is you wanted to do with these images. Since it has taken work to get here, the most obvious thing to do is to create a new Album. Newer images added to the Library will not show up in that album, but you will have recorded what you found, and you can use that Album to print, create a gallery, export, or make further selections from.

Note that under the hood, there is only really one filter. You can see this if you filter thumbnails already selected with a smart filter: there is no New Smart Album button on the filter dialog. That's because behind the scenes the thumbnail filter is just temporarily modifying the Smart Album database query.