Fraser Speirs (of FlickrExport fame) shares his Aperture workflow:

Someone asked me recently about how I work through my photographs after I shoot. When I go out to photograph, I shoot a lot - most people I go out with are usually surprised at the number of frames I produce. It’s not uncommon for me to take the kids to the park and come home with 150-300 images.I find that I can usually edit down 350 images to around 50 in 40-60 minutes and I thought I would share how I go about this.

He also has a more recent blog entry entitled When I Delete a Photo (almost never, basically). I have a different philosophy: I reject many photos and delete all the rejects about once a month.

Tags: Aperture, Workflow, Deleting, Renaming, Referenced

File Juicer is a small Mac OS X application that extracts images, movies, text, and other useful data from practically anything. It's useful to Aperture users in two important ways: it can recover usable images from the library if the masters are lost and and can scrounge deleted images from memory cards.

One of the hazards of working with referenced image masters is that their management is the responsibility of the owner. Accidental deletions are not that uncommon, and if that happens then while Aperture can display the images, it cannot export or otherwise use any of the versions that are based on the lost masters. If the masters are truly lost -- no back ups, nothing in the trash -- then whatever images can be found become valuable.

If high resolution previews were generated, then these can be extracted from the Aperture library by simply selecting the thumbnail images in the browser and dragging them to the desktop. They will be in JPEG format and at a size and resolution that depends on the settings in Aperture's preferences:

If there are no previews, then attention turns to the thumbnail files that Aperture stores in each project. It is these images that are used to display the on-screen thumbnails in the browser pane and as placeholder images in the viewer while Aperture processes the RAW image. The files that contain the thumbnails are called AP.Tinies, AP.Minis, and AP.Thumbnails and contain images at 32, 256, and 1024 pixel sizes respectively. They are also present in exported projects, but not in vaults.

To get to the thumbnails, I control-click on the library and select Show Package Contents. Then I navigate down to the project of interest and open that with a control-click and Show Package Contents:

The AP.Thumbnails file is one big chunk of binary data, but inside there are complete JPEG images. File Juicer will go into it and locate and extract the JPEGs without knowing the format of the file.

I launch File Juicer and check that the preferences are set to include JPEG images (at least):

I also make sure that the extracted files will be stored somewhere sensible, such as on the desktop, because I don't want the extracted images put inside my Aperture library:

With the selections I have made, File Juicer will put each image type into a separate folder and create a parent folder for those. It will also get an HTML index file for easy browsing. To start scanning for images, I drop the AP.Thumbnails file from my project onto the main File Juicer window and wait for it to process:

After processing I get a new folder on my desktop containing the images:

And I can either open the jpg folder and browse the image icons in the Finder (or watch a slide show), or click on the index.html icon and see all the images in a browser window as a panoramic display:

Now my images have been extracted, I can reimport them into Aperture and sort through them. They will be smaller then the originals -- only up to 1024 pixels on a side-- and there will be one image per version. So a single lost master will result in five recovered JPEGs if it had five versions in that project. This is good because I get my adjusted images, albeit at low resolution.

Since File Juicer is scavenging for JPEGs rather than following any information that Aperture provides, there are some side-effects. The first is that there may be old images or possibly corrupted images in the folder of JPEGs. The second is that the names of the images are sequential and bear no relationship to the order in which they were taken or anything else. The third is that there is no EXIF or other metadata in the JPEGs, so all the keywords, camera and shooting data are lost.

File Juicer will also recover RAW and other images that have been deleted from camera cards, so if masters have been lost it is possible that they can be obtained that way. The process is very similar to the thumbnail recovery described here, except that there is an extra step at the beginning where File Juicer creates a disk image of the card and scans that.

The File Juicer web site has a page dedicated to its use with Aperture, and one about RAW image formats.

Tags: Aperture, Recover, Masters, Referenced, Deleting, Bone-Headedness, Hacking, Previews

Great blog-- thanks!! I seem to have "misplaced" a master image. Not quite sure what happened. I opened it (twice) with an external editor and attempted to delete one version (using the 'Delete Version' option). I did not choose 'Delete Master and all Versions' option and Aperture never asked me to confirm this action. However, all traces of the photo now appear to be gone from the library. I drilled through using the 'Show page contents' tool and looked at previews. There is no folder in the project for this image. I have recently backed up my Vaults before editing. Is there any way I can recover a single master image from a vault? Thanks in advance for any suggestions!!

Yes, single images can be retrieved from vaults. By navigating down into the vault or by searching, the image can be located and copied out using the Finder. Once copied, it can be imported back into Aperture. This will lose all versions and adjustments, and any metadata that is not part of the original master file.

But first, check for the image in the trash. Images in Aperture that are deleted are put into the trash in a folder called Aperture. Inside that is another folder with the name of the project the image was in. Inside that is the images deleted from that project.

I'll find and restore a deleted image from a vault. The organization of a vault is very similar to that of the library, so delving into the vault is very similar to delving into the library. Since in this case I know that the name of the deleted image included the number 2486, I can search on that. First I open the vault using control-click and Show Package Contents:

Then by typing the part of the name I know into the Finder's search box, I can quickly locate the image:

I can use the slideshow and other features of the Finder window to examine my image. Once located, I option-drag the image out of the Finder window to copy it to the desktop, then drag it onto a project in Aperture to import it again.

If I had not already known part of the name of the image, then I would have had to do more work. By typing JPG into the search box (since I know that my master image was a JPG) I can find all the images and then browse through them:

This will of course work for other file name extensions such as CR2 or NEF. Selecting a image in the Finder window shows the full path at the bottom and double-clicking a folder in that list will open the folder for further examination. Control-click can be used to open projects that show up the path by selecting Show Package Contents. As before I can option-drag image masters out to copy them and restore them to Aperture.

If the deleted image is not in the trash and also not in the vault, there is one last place it may be. Images deleted from vaults by a vault update are not removed entirely, but they are not put into the trash. Instead the folder that holds the vault contains a folder with Deleted Images in its name. Inside that is a folder named for the date and time of the vault sync that removed the image from the vault. Inside that are folders for the deleted images and the masters:

My image is now available for reimporting into Aperture. The techniques I show here can also be used to find out if the image really was deleted from the Library in the first place.

Tags: Aperture, Q&A, Vaults, Deleting, Masters, Recover, Bone-Headedness

Ever had this happen?

This project is full of duplicates. There are only 30 images I need to remove in this example, so I can do it by hand, but what if I had a thousand?

There are two ways to remove duplicates: find something that is common to all images in one set and filter on that, or find something that is common to each pair of images and use that to create a thumbnail arrangement that makes for easy selection.

An example of using the first method is to see if the duplicates exist because they were imported a second time. If this is the case then they have a separate import session and I can filter them and remove them. It's easy to check. I click on the filter button top right, select Import Session and see just two. I select one of the two import sessions to filter down to just one set of images:

Then I select all the images will command A and delete them with command delete. When I show all the images in the project, just one set is left.

If the duplicate images were imported together this does not work, so I need a different method of distinguishing them. For example, if one set of duplicates is a different size then I can filter on the EXIF data and use a condition such as Image Height Is Less Than to split them:

To use the second method, that of pairing up the duplicates, the sort order must use an image property that is the same for each duplicate, such as image date, caption, file name, or possibly file size. It depends on where the images came from as to what is available and what will work. The list view can be useful for doing this because it can sort on a much wider variety of image data than the grid view.

Once sorted, and assuming that every image has the same number of duplicates (all have one duplicate in my example), I arrange the display to show the duplicates in rows:

To select the ones that I want to remove, I simply click and drag a selection rectangle from the top to the bottom on the left-hand column:

Once selected, I press command delete to remove them. Just marking them with a keyword or as rejects are other options open to me. It depends how certain I am that I want them removed permanently and right now.

Another way I can get rid of duplicates is to hide them in stacks. This works only if the images have their image dates intact. I select all the images and go to Stack > Autostack. By addjusting the slider on the autostack HUD, the images are paired:

I close all the stacks with option semicolon and the problem has been hidden. If I later want to delete the duplicates, I can open all the stacks and adjust the width of the grid view to show one stack per row. Then I drag a selection rectangle across the right-hand images to select the images and delete them.

Having the duplicates in a stack like this also lets me mark one set. Selecting all the closed stacks and adding a keyword will only apply the keyword to the pick. If I subsequently unstack the images, I can then use that keyword to filter and remove the duplicates.

Tags: Aperture, Duplicates, Workflow, Deleting

Josh and Ellen Anon have a very interesting post and discussion going on at O'Reilly. The topic is this: suppose you have lots and lots of images that were shot as RAW+JPEG in your Aperture library and you no longer want the JPEGs? They can use up a ton of space. How do you get rid of the JPEGs?

The short answer is that you don't. At least not with the tools supplied in Aperture, since Aperture treats the RAW file and the JPEG as a single composite master and won't let you do anything with them individually except create a new master from the JPEG. That new master can be deleted, but it doesn't buy you anything since the original JPEG is still there with the RAW file.

I have as technique that I think is better then Ellen and Josh's. It uses only the Finder and doesn't require any Terminal typing or scripts. And I don't leave any files behind. So without further ado, I'll show you what I do.

[Update: Aperture.fr has an Automator action that achieves the opposite: gets rid of the RAW files and leaves the JPEGs. It does, however, lose any adjustment history. Site is in French]

Here is a project called Yard shoot inside a blue folder:

All three of the images are RAW+JPG. Here they are:

I'll look inside the project to see how it is organized. I open up my Aperture library with control-click and select Show Package Contents, then navigate to the Z folder and then control-click on the Yard shoot project file and select Show Package Contents again. Here are all the files:

I can see the RAW files (CR2) and their JPEG (JPG)sisters. I can also see the apfiles which contain Aperture's information about the image files and the apmaster file that documents the master. What I want to do is to get rid of the JPG files and their apfiles, but leave the CR2 files alone and not leave the apmaster file in a state that will confuse Aperture. Also notice the JPEG files in there that are in the Previews and Thumbnails folders. Those are the previews used for iLife and other applications, and I may want to keep those.

1. Export the project

First I export the project to a temporary location. It looks like this:

2. Open up the project package

It's a package just like the library, so I control-click and select Show Package Contents to view its insides:

3. Find all the JPEG files in the package

I type .JPG into the search box top right and press return:

The Finder window changes to show me the apfiles and the images that match. I can tell the image files apart by looking at the pixel sizes underneath.

4. Select all the files and delete them

If I want to delete all the JPEG files (including the previews) then this step is easy. Select all with command A and delete them with command Delete. Command delete does not appear to do anything at all, but actually it has moved the files to trash. Close the window.

4a. or Select some of the files and delete them

If I want to delete only some of the JPEGs or if I want to leave the previews alone then I have to be selective. By command clicking on all the images that I want to delete, I can make a selection. I'm deleting the JPEGs for images 2563 and 2565 in this case, so I select those.

While it is not critical that the apfiles get deleted too it can be good to be neat. Making this additional selection can be made much easier with the following trick. Press command J to bring up the Finder view options and make sure that This window only is selected. Now select Group By Date and within the group, By Name:

The window changes, but the selections are still there:

Now I can easily command click the apfiles that immediately follow the images already selected and add them to my selection. I do that, and then press command Delete and close the window.

Now if I look in the exported project I see that the JPEGs I wanted gone are gone and the JPEGs I wanted to keep are still there:

5. Reimport the project into Aperture

I create a new blue folder for my project to avoid confusion, and drag the fixed project in:

Now the images I removed the JPEGs from no longer have the option to create a new master from the JPEG:

6. Clean up

After checking the project, I delete the temporary copy and the original. I am done.

Why do all this with an external project? One reason is that it is much safer to operate on a copy of the data than the original, so exporting the project satisfies that urge. The other reason is that the result is much neater. When the project is imported, Aperture does some checking and fixes up the apmaster files.

The original apmaster files have the JPEG listed (originalJPEGFileUUID):

But the fixed and imported image no longer lists the JPEG:

Hopefully Apple will add this facility into a future version of Aperture and we can avoid jumping though all these hoops entirely.

Tags: Aperture, JPEG, RAW, RAW+JPEG, Library, Projects, Deleting

Congrats on your blog! There definitely is a lack of consciousness on Apple's side with regard to the ease of use of manuals which should - in our opinion - reflect the ease of use of their hard- and software (which is not the case). Thanks for every effort to change that! I spent a lot of time trying to understand the project/album/folder business. It may become a little easier with your help. The next thing (which I suppose is linked with the above subject) I will have to get my teeth in is "How do I delete a version and keep the master"? Until now I have not found a way to delete just this one file and be sure I have not done harm to something else.

A warning dialog is always presented when a master is about to be deleted. When no masters will be deleted, the delete proceeds without the warning and the operation can be undone with command Z.

When you select an image and delete it with Delete Version, that version will always be deleted. The master is only deleted if the last version is deleted, so if you see the dialog, that's the last version. File > Delete Master Image and All Versions always trashes the master and all the versions, and gives the same warning dialog.

Some confusion arises with images in albums. Remember that albums are just a different way of looking at the same images that are in projects. They are not themselves separate versions. Any change to an image in an album (including deleting) will affect the image in the project and all other representations of that image in other albums in exactly the same way. On the other hand, removing an image from an album will make it disappear without deleting it.

Note that the images you see are always versions, since you cannot see or manipulate the master directly. Each time a photo is added to Aperture, it stores the master and creates a version from it that contains no adjustments or modifications. There is nothing special about that particular version. The consequence of this is that if new versions are created either by duplicating existing versions or directly from the master, then none of them is the "master" version. You can delete versions in any order and only when the last version is deleted will the master be deleted.

Tags: Aperture, Deleting, Versions, Masters, Library, Q&A

I’ve very much enjoyed reading our articles about Aperture. You obviously know you’re way around the program. Have you come up with a system to quickly delete rejects? The Aperture manual doesn’t even talk about deleting rejects. The method I’m using I find painfully slow. Presently I select an image, hit the #9 key and mark it as a reject. I then select view all rejects. I highlight all of them and then go to File>Delete Master and all Versions. It then deletes the last image I selected, not all the ones highlighted. I have to follow up and delete each image individually.  I want to love this program but It’s difficult due to how hard it is to get rid of bad images easily. It’s obvious Apple doesn’t want this to happen since they don’t even have anything about deleting rejects in the PDF manual which I searched. Any thoughts are greatly appreciated and maybe this is a good idea for an article. Thanks in advance.

What you are missing is that you have Primary Only turned on. It's very easy to do this by accident because the shortcut is the S key. Here is the button:

If turned on, whatever you do will only affect the primary (thick white outline) image, not all the others (thin white outline). Here are six images in the viewer (not thumbnails -- just a very small viewer pane) with Primary Only turned off:

And here is primary Only turned on. Notice that only the primary is shown with a line around:

Here are two ways of deleting rejects, each with its own advantages and disadvantages:

Delete Rejects In The Current Project or Album
Press keys in this sequence: Control 8, Command A, Command Delete, Return.

Control 8 shows just the rejects, removing any other filter in use. Command A selects all of them. Command Delete deletes them. Return accepts the dialog box. And the state of the Primary Selection Only does not matter to Command Delete. There is a catch with this method of deleting though -- this will not delete rejects that are inside stacks. But the second method below gets those too.

Delete Rejects In The Entire Library
I have a smart album that I set up to delete rejects across the entire library:


Notice that it was created with the Library selected so it applies across all projects. And that the Ignore Stack Grouping is checked. That lets it look inside stacks and means that I don't have to mess with opening and closing stacks all over to clear out the rejects.

I select the smart album, then command A, command Delete, Return. It can be good to command option B before all that to maximize the browser in order to give the images one last check.

Tags: Q&A, Aperture, Deleting, Referenced

Hi, my whole Aperture Library is based on referenced files. I already had a document structure in my Pictures folder before I started using Aperture. Now I dragged these folders right onto my Library icon inside Aperture (as you suggest in one of your tips). However there's one thing I really, really miss: How can I completely delete pictures? When I do photoshotings I use to filter my photos, look for the best results and then delete the bad ones. Appearently this doesn't work. I get a notification and then the file is deleted from my Aperture Library. However it's still on my harddrive. Is there a way to delete a picture in both the Aperture Library _and_ on my harddisk?

There is a misunderstanding here that is causing some confusion. By dragging your photo folders into Aperture you created a project inside the library and also caused Aperture to copy those images into its library: your images are actually managed, not referenced. The dialog you saw:

Shows this to be the case. If you were attempting to delete any referenced images, then you would have seen this dialog:

which includes an option to trash the masters that are outside the library.

In order to import your images as referenced masters you will have to use the File > Import > Images or File > Import > Images Into a Project items from the menu. Once you do that to bring up the dialog makes sure that the Store Files: option is set appropriately, in your case to In their current location:



But your question raises an interesting problem. What if I were to delete my library images but not move the referenced files to the trash? Where does that leave me? It leaves me with a problem. I now have masters on a disk somewhere that are not connected to the library in any way. So if I want to delete them or use them somehow later I am out of luck. I have no way to find or isolate them to delete them. I will call these orphaned masters.

How To Recover Orphaned Masters

Here is a folder on my disk that contains referenced files. There are sixteen of them:

I imported all sixteen by reference so that the masters were left in this folder and the Aperture library just contained pointers to them. Then I deleted three images, but did so without letting Aperture move the masters to the trash, so in this folder are three orphaned masters. But which three?

Here is how to find out. First in Aperture I select everything that could be in the folder (project, album, import session, or whatever does it) and then relocate those to some temporary location, choosing to move the masters, not copy:

Now look at what is left in the original folder:

Just the three that Aperture did not know about: the three I had deleted. So now I can delete them for real or move them or do whatever else I want. Once that is complete I can use relocate again to restore my masters to their original position if that is what I want.

Tags: Aperture, Deleting, Referenced, Masters, Q&A, Recover