I use Privoxy to filter ads and other assorted nasty stuff. It runs as a proxy HTTP server, so I set up my computer so that all my HTTP traffic is channeled through it rather than going directly to the web. The Leopard version is a little different from the Tiger version and it took a while to figure out how to make it work.

First I download Privoxy. There are two pieces, the utility and the application itself. I go to the download page and under the Mac OS X section selected Privoxy 3.0.8 Universal and the PrivoxyUtility.

Then, having unpacked them I instal Privoxy and run the utility to start Privoxy running. In the system preferences I go to Network, selected my Ethernet port and click on Advanced.... to set up the Proxy tab like this:

Now all accesses by applications that use the system proxy settings will go through IP address 127.0.0.1 (my local machine) at port 8118 where Privoxy is listening. I also set up HTTPS the same way. This setting does not affect Firefox because Firefox ignores the system and has its own proxy settings.

Done. Privoxy is now filtering ads.

But sometimes I want to turn it off, or make certain sites bypass the filtering. Configuration changes are done through a web browser. By going to a special URL (http://config.privoxy.org/) I can change the way Privoxy runs. The problem I found is that by default the Leopard version does not allow configurations to be changed this way: configuration change options are missing from the page.

From the available information, it is not obvious where the global configuration file for Privoxy is located. I had to look at the installer code to learn that it is in /usr/local/etc/privoxy. I use the Finder's Go menu and selected Go to Location... to open that folder and then drag the file config onto TextWrangler. I set the string enable-remote-toggle to 1. That allows Privoxy to be turned on and off via the http://config.privoxy.org/ address. I also set enable-edit-actions to 1 so I can reconfigure the filters.

To make the configuration file change have any effect I stop and then start Privoxy via the Privoxy Utility:

Now I get the option to toggle Privoxy on and off:

The first line gives me the ability to add web sites that I want to block or allow:

In the user.action file I can add lines to allow content through. The web interface shown above just makes it a little easier than editing raw text files.

Editing the raw files involves adding and changing lines like these:

# Allow all cookies from these sites
{ allow-all-cookies }
.smugmug.com

# Turn off filtering for these sites
{-filter }
.smugmug.com
.bagelturf.com

# Allow advertising through on these sites
{ allow-ads }
.slashdot.com
.dpreview.com

#No access to these sites
{+block}
.maxim.com

It's not difficult, but takes a little while to find out how to do some basic things because the terminology is not standard and there are a lot of macros to deal with. There is a lot more documentation on the Privoxy site.

Tags: Leopard, Privoxy, Advertising, Filtering

Aperture's smart album filtering logic offers only the most basic logical choice: all the conditions set in the dialog or any of the conditions set in the dialog. This means that while there are many different criteria provided, it not apparently possible to combine them in complex ways.

However, due to the fact that there are actually two levels of filtering provided by the thumbnail and grid views, impossible filters can be constructed. For instance, I can find images taken on Wednesday OR Thursday OR Friday AND at between 100 and 130mm focal length. I can find images with the keyword Duck OR Swan OR Goose AND the keyword Lake AND rated two stars and above. And if I want, I can make these type of smart filters specific to a single project or to a collection of projects in a blue folder.

Here is how to combine logic using the two available levels. I'll use the requirement that I need to view all RAW images taken in 2007. To find all RAW images I have to create a filter that ORs together all the different kinds of RAW there can be, since there is no setting for "is RAW".

First I select the library and create a new smart album and call it RAW-2007:

I select the Library before I create the smart album because I want this to work on all my images. The dialog reflects this in its title.

Then I set the match to be ANY and filter to Filename ends with .CR2. I add some more conditions for the file name ending that deal with all the RAW formats I am going encounter:

I could check the Ignore stack groupings box at the bottom if I wanted to look inside stacks. This first filter finds all the RAW images in my library.

I close the dialog and with the smart album still selected I click on the filter icon on the browser, top right.

To set up the second level of filtering I filter on the EXIF capture year and match it to 2007:

I could add more conditions at this point, such as ratings or camera model, if I wished.

To make more filters similar to this one, say for different years, I duplicate the smart album, rename it, and then change the year number in the filter:

This second level of filtering works because each album, project, and smart album remembers its current filter setting. I have to be careful not to change it once I have the thumbnails displayed or else it will not work as expected when I reinvoke it. One way to reduce this risk is to select all the RAW-2007 images and create a new regular album from them (or just use the New Album With Current Images button) Since no more images will be added in 2007, the contents of that static album should never change.

Tags: Aperture, Filtering, Metadata, Smart Albums, RAW, Library

I quite often do searches for pics by keywords etc.. but when I do find an image through the search I would like then to look at the other images from that project, so how do I find out what the project is and where it is in the Aperture Projects view, I could do with something similar to the 'Show in Finder' feature... am I missing something obvious somewhere?

You are not missing anything obvious. The features for doing this are somewhat limited, but it can be done.

Here is an album that displays some images. I want to find out which project the dog photo comes from:

By selecting the image and bringing up the metadata panel of the information pane I can look at the Master Location:

The Master Location is the name of the project that contains the master, so I can just go look there. If the project is in a blue folder or two, then those folder names will be given in a bread-crumb style list: Outer folder > Inner folder > Project.

A more specific method that will locate the master image more uniquely is to copy the File Name, and do a search on it. Start by creating a filter on the entire library:

And then either paste the file name into the text box:

Or use the + pull-down menu top right to add a new search term (Other Data) and specifically choose the File Name option.

The former can be very slow because it may search all the text in the library in a linear fashion. The latter takes longer to set up, but is more precise, matching only file names, and much faster. In either case, check the Ignore stack groupings box if you want to look inside stacks. More than one image may be found because, depending on how you have your master files named, there may be duplication. In the example I show here, the name that the camera gave me has the date appended, so I will only find a single image.

The same technique can be applied to the caption. I caption everything I keep, layering captions onto many images at a time. To find "similar" images, usually from the same project, I just search using part of the caption.

A fast way of finding images taken with the original (and usually part of the same project) is to note the date it was taken and filter the library on that date:

Using the calendar uses very few clicks and uses indexed information, so can often be the fastest.

None of these methods will show which albums contain a particular image. Nor is is possible to find out how many time and image has been used in albums. The best workaround I can think of is to delve into the library and search for image UUIDs, but this is messy.

Tags: Aperture, Q&A, Filtering, Projects, Metadata

I think I just found a bug in Aperture and I'm wondering if you've come across it or have a workaround/solution. I'm trying to do a search by shutter speed. The speed I'm trying to isolate is 1/30 sec. The thing is, I try to use Aperture's EXIF search by creating a smart album and then using the "Smart Settings" of "Shutter Speed - is - 1/30" Ah -- so here we are at the bug: This field doesn't seem to offer support for fractions. Entering 1/30 will give me photos with a shutter speed of 1 sec. Any suggestions?

Aperture records the shutter speed as seconds and in floating point, so it is not interpreting the numbers you type as intended.

To filter on shutter speed, add a new line based on the EXIF data to a filter:

And then select Shutter Speed. If the shutter speed is a simple integral value like 1/100s, you can select is and type in the value, 0.01 in this case. Use a calculator to get the decimal value of the fraction. For trickier values such as 1/30s, it's best to use a range and bracket the exact value of 0.0333333 like so:

This kind of thing lends itself to saving as a smart album in order to save repeating all the typing. It would be nice if Aperture could recognize fractions correctly, or even have a pop-up of common shutter speeds available.

Tags: Q&A, Aperture, Filtering, Shutter Speed

One of those little-appreciated features of Aperture is that is is possible to display two thumbnail browsers at the same time. What is more, an unlimited number of browsers can be finger-tip ready in tabs for each of those browsers.

Here is a typical display with one browser. The project it shows is highlighted in the file pane on the left:

To get the second browser, I option-click on a different project or album:

With a viewer present, shift W and option W can be used to change the arrangement of the viewer and the grid views, but I don't have one in this example.

To add more browsers in tabs, I select the browser and command click on more projects or albums or smart galleries or anything else I like. I have added two more to the right-hand browser:

And I can rearrange these by dragging tabs from one browser to the other:

Fun! But where is the profit? Here are some of the things I can do with this. You can probably think of many more.

Compare Images in one album with those in another

With a viewer displayed, I select an image in one browser and press Return. That sets the Compare item. Now I select images from the other browser to compare then side-by-side:

As well as comparing them I can also adjust one of them. I might have a certain "look" of one image that I want to get in another. If they are in separate projects I can display them by using Compare and adjust one while using the other as a reference.

View a web gallery while browsing other projects

By putting the projects or albums that contain the images for the web gallery on tabs (top right), I can use the other browser to hold the web album images (bottom right). I just drag the images from the tabbed browsers into the web gallery browser:

As I click on the tabs I lose the web gallery viewer as it displays the selected image in the other projects. If I want to prevent that (and I usually do) I lock the viewer to the web gallery browser by clicking on the lock:

This same technique also works for light tables:

Move images from one project to another while looking at the contents of both

This is a pretty obvious thing to be able to do, but it can be very useful. I might have a certain number of images that is needed for a specific purpose, or some reason for a specific order of some images. By being able to view both projects at the same time I can move images back and forth until I get what I want.

Create an album from several projects by dragging between browsers

I set up the workspace with an album on one side and several projects on the other. For each project, I pick out the images I want and drag them to the album. This lets me view the album while I am building it:

Switch between projects without bringing up the project pane

This is handy if I am working on a small screen. I can open all the projects I will need in tabs and then close the project pane with W. And I can rearrange the tabs of a browser by dragging.

See a complete project alongside multiple albums from that project

If I want to take a project and distribute its contents across several albums, I can do that easily with multiple browsers. I click on the project and create several empty albums inside that project, then put all of those albums in tabs on one browser alongside the project in the other browser. Now I can go through my project one image at a time and add the image to the appropriate album as I see fit:

See only the two-star or less images alongside the three-star images of a project

All this works for smart albums too. I can set up two smart albums and view them together. Here is one smart album on the left that shows three star images only, and one on the right that shows two stars or less. As I change the ratings the images "move" from one browser to the other:

Smart albums can be used for many other purposes, so by appropriately setting up the albums I can mark images with a keyword using the keyword button shortcuts (option number) and watch them move from one browser to the other as they are processed in some way.

Display the same browser data sorted two ways using an album

Sometimes the order of the images is important. Since albums have an order that is independent of other albums and the projects that they draw their images from, displaying albums side-by-side can be used to see the same images in different orders at the same time. Here are the same images viewed by date on the left and by version name on the right:

The same works for filtering. I can have two different filtered views of the same images side-by-side. And don't forget the list view:

The list view provides a very quick way of finding some information that is not so obvious from the other metadata views.

Tags: Aperture, Browsers, Workspace, Smart Albums, Filtering

Is there a way to set up a Smart Album for photos that have not be edited or adjusted? I looked for a parameter to do that, but can't find it. I know edited photos get marked and I could manually keyword the unmarked ones, but I wanted to see if you found a more automatic way of collecting together unedited photos in Aperture.

There is no way to do this with Aperture 1.5.1. I have seen it requested a number of times and could certainly use it myself. It's a pretty basic workflow requirement. Aperture should be able to filter and sort on any image attribute. The list view does give access to a column that includes the badges:

but alas sorting does not work on that column. So although there is a compact visual way of finding the unadjusted ones, it is not even possible to sort all the badged items to one end of the grid view.

Tags: Q&A, Aperture, Adjustments, Filtering

By using a simple trick, revealed in a conversation with Anthony Caltabiano, I have found that I can make all keywords appear in the filter dialog and so make it possible to filter quickly and accurately on any keyword at any level, something thought impossible.

In a previous article, I described how Aperture's keyword system only directly allows filtering by the lowest level keywords. By lowest level I mean the ones at the bottom of the keyword hierarchy. For example:

Content > Water > Ocean > Surf

Surf is the lowest level. Any time I add Surf to an image, the higher-level keywords Ocean, Water, and Content are sort of added to the image -- they are visible in the metadata pane -- but not usefully added to the image because they don't appear in the keyword checkbox list on a filter dialog. While it is possible to work around this using the IPTC keyword field, it is clumsy and error-prone.

Maybe Apple will deal with this in future (Aperture is at 1.5.1 as I write), but until then, we need help. I have a small example project with images, all tagged according to content:

To do this tagging I used the following hierarchy (yes I know a turtle is not a mammal, but there it is):

I tagged by dragging the lowest level keywords to the images. If I want to filter by Water I cannot do it directly because Water does not appear in the keyword list on the filter dialog:

As expected, clicking on Stone gives me this selection:

Now for the magic. I take the image below (click for full-size version) and add it to the project.

This is my keyword keeper. Any image will do, but this one is useful because it identifies itself. Now I bring up the keyword HUD (shift H) and select and drag every high-level keyword I want to filter on to that image:

You can save a lot of clicking by knowing that the left and right arrows open and close the keyword levels in the HUD, and the up and down arrows move the selection up and down. Command-clicking on keywords selects more than one. There probably are not all that many higher-level keywords in any library, because most of the keyword population is at the lowest level.

Now that the Keyword Keeper image has those keywords, let's look at the keyword HUD again:

All those high level words are there! And if I click on Animal I get the following as expected:

To integrate this method into your library you will need a few extra steps:

1. Create a new project call Keyword Keeper and put the Keyword Keeper image into it. Add all the high level keywords as above.

2. Create a new keyword at the top level called Keyword Keeper and add it to the Keyword Keeper image. This is an important step, as it will save much effort later.

3. Now duplicate the image into all of the projects you want to by clicking on it and option-dragging. The copies will retain all the keywords.

At a future date, when you expand your keyword hierarchy, you will need to update your Keyword Keeper images. To do this, select the Library and filter on the keyword Keyword Keeper. Select all of them and drag the new higher-level keyword onto one of them. Now the new keyword will work in all of the projects that contain the Keyword Keeper image.

Tags: Aperture, Filtering, Keywords, Hierarchy

I missed a trick in my article on negative filtering, and it was the originator of the question that pointed it out to me. You can directly do negative filtering on keywords via the IPTC metadata. This works because the IPTC field is kept up to date with the keywords that are added to the image.

I have updated the article to reflect this newfound knowledge.

Tags: Aperture, Filtering, Negative, Keywords

First of all, you have a great website! It really has helped me get more out of Aperture! Question for you – is there a way to create a filter that EXCLUDES images with a certain keyword. Example, on import, I marked everything with “Wedding,” but I tag the ones that need some PS work also with “Retouch.” I would like to have a way to do a filter (or smart album/web gallery) that excludes that keyword.

This can be done with keywords, but with some caveats. And there are other ways to work that will let do what you are trying to achieve -- perform negative filtering.

In short the answer is to use IPTC metadata fields, or use custom fields and exploit the features of those. The full solution, together with a technique for using this metadata in your workflow requires a whole article on negative filtering (posted just below this Q&A on the blog and archived in the Metadata section of the Aperture Articles).

Tags: Aperture, Q&A, Filtering, Negative, Keywords

A question that frequently arises is how to do negative filtering in Aperture. Negative filtering includes an image if it does not match some criterion, usually in combination with other logic. For instance "photos taken in March that have not been retouched". Since keywords are the most familiar form of metadata in Aperture, users apply them to images and then look around for the Keyword Is Not check box, cannot find it, and wonder what to do next.

First, here are several ways of doing negative filtering that either don't work or are clumsy:

1. Albums and project membership
Although you can "mark" images that have been processed in some way as part of your workflow by their location or by album or project membership, this is a clumsy way to work. It involves a lot of moving things around and you cannot filter on membership.

2. Version names
Not recommended. Again, clumsy. But you can filter on version names, so it's not all bad. Naming systems break easily though.

3. Rating bands
By dividing ratings into two sets, say greater than three and three and under it is possible to use the Rating is less than or equal to and Rating is greater than or equal to selections to create negative filtering. But that only gives you one thing you can filter on, chops up your ratings, and is prone to error.

So here is the meat: three ways that do work. The first uses IPTC keywords, the second an existing metadata field and the third a custom metadata field. You didn't know you could have those did you?

Negative Filtering With IPTC Keywords

The IPTC Keywords field is kept up to date with the keywords that are added to the image, so you can use all the features of the IPTC string matching. Select IPTC from the + menu top right and select IPTC. Select Keywords from the pop-up and you can do this:



For simple negative filtering this works, but it has some disadvantages too. This stems from the fact that the IPTC keyword field is simply a list of keywords strung together with commas. Let's say your images contain two people called Bob and Bobby. If you try to filter on IPTC Keywords contains Bobby and IPCT Keywords does not contain Bob (because nobody likes Bob any more), you will find that he stubbornly sticks around. That's because simple lexical matching is used and so Bob matches Bob and Bobby. Worse, you find that is and is not are case-sensitive while contains and does not contain are not. And worse still is the odd fact that while Cow will match Cow if is is used, it will not if another keyword is added. Give me a list of checkboxes, please!

The keyword list does not exhibit this behavior. Nor does using separate IPTC fields to achieve the negative filtering.

An inconvenience is that there is a lot of clicking and typing involved: click on the +, select IPTC, click on the pop-up, scroll down to Keywords, select the logic, and finally type in the keyword. If you typo it, then you won't get what you expect.

A possibly more serious problem is that searching IPTC fields is very slow for many images because Aperture does not index that in its database. Try selecting your whole library and setting up a search for contains "e" and does not contain "zzzzzzzzzzz". It will take a while. Try the opposite too.

A future problem is that when Apple implements proper hierarchy filtering (filtering on keyword Animal where Animal is above Cow without resorting to a plain text search), this trick with IPTC metadata will not work with Animal just as it does not now. That's because the higher-level keywords are not in the IPTC metadata field unless you specifically put them there and if they are not there, you can't filter on them at all.

Negative Filtering With IPTC Metadata

Let's say you want to be able to filter on one attribute, Retouch, or Not Retouch. To do this select all the images you want to be able to distinguish (either positively or negatively), and then open the metadata inspector (control D). Select IPTC at the bottom, and then All IPTC from the pop-up title bar. Now pick one of the fields to commandeer. In the example below I have chosen Action Advised, because I will never use it for its intended purpose.

Now bring up the Batch Change window with command shift B and type retouch into the Action Advised field:


Press Enter on the numeric keypad or click OK and that metadata will be added to all the selected images. The metadata pane that you previously opened will show that the images now have that metadata added:



So now all the images you want to retouch are tagged and all the ones you don't want to retouch are untagged.

Let's filter on that. Bring up a filter and select IPTC from the + menu top right:



From the IPCT pop-up, select Action Advised, and then one of the matching verbs:



Use contains or is for positive filtering and is empty for negative filtering. You would think that is not would match on an empty field, but it does not.

Voila! Negative filtering.

This method has the advantage that it can also be used to add metadata on import. You can tag everything with a certain value (like retouch) and then adjust the metadata when workflow actions have been performed or a decision is made that they do not need to be performed.

Negative Filtering With Custom Metadata

Another way to achieve the same goal without abusing the IPTC fields is to add custom metadata. This takes a few more steps because the Batch Change window cannot be used to do this. But custom metadata can be added on import if it is included in one of the metadata sets.

Select just one image you want to tag (either positively or negatively). Go back to the metadata pane bottom right of the Aperture window and select the General view. Click on Other at the bottom, and where it says New Custom Metadata in gray add the word Retouch. On the right where it says Metadata Value in gray, add the word Yes:



Now click on the circle + on the right and it will be added as a metadata value to the single image you selected. There it is:



Click on the checkbox on the left if you want to add this field to the General metadata set. You probably want to add it to some set just so it is visible (the Tooltip set would be a good choice to).

So far so good, but that is only one image, and there could be hundreds.

Press the O button on the keyboard (letter Oh) to bring up the Lift and Stamp window and click on the image you just added the metadata to. That will show the copied data. Open the Custom line by clicking the disclosure triangle:


Now edit this by deleting the unwanted lines by selecting and hitting the delete key to get this:


The remaining task is to stamp this onto all the images that need it. Clicking on the thumbnails will do it since the cursor is now the down-arrow Stamp tool. Press A when you are done.

To filter images that have been tagged in this way, you will need a slightly different filter than used before with IPTC. Bring up a filter and select Other from the + pop-up top right. Select Retouch from the pop-up:



And use contains, is, is empty, etc. to perform positive and negative filtering as needed. There is also no reason not to use several different values for the Retouch field if that does what you want.

Voila again! Negative filtering.

An advantage of this method over the IPTC trick is that there is no limit to the number of custom metadata fields you can add to an image.

Workflow Enhancement

But neither of these solutions are really any good since you are looking at thumbnails while you do it. How do you know which ones to retouch? More than likely you are in full-screen mode and you want to decide whether to retouch or not as you go along, as part of an overall workflow. That can be achieved too.

With the Lift and Stamp window the way you want it (like above), work as follows. Close the Lift and Stamp window with the X top left. Click on the first image in your set and hit F to go to full-screen. Scroll through the images working on them as usual (but not lifting and stamping anything) until you find one you want to retouch. Press O to bring up the Lift tool (up arrow) and the Lift and Stamp window. But don't click on anything!

Hold down the option key and the cursor changes into the Stamp tool. Click on the full screen image to add the custom metadata to it. There is no feedback to tell you that this has worked, but it has. Close the Lift and Stamp window and continue working on images. Repeat as needed and close the Lift and Stamp window at the end.

I will stop writing French now.

Tags: Aperture, Negative, Keywords, Filtering

OK, I seem to remember from documentation and also from some of the "preview" movies of aperture 1.0, that if you had keywords arranged hierarchically, that if you applied "surf," which is located as "Nature>Water>Ocean>Surf," that basically, each of the parent words would also be associated with that picture, meaning you would not have to manually add EACH parent item to the picture....

but I can't seem to get this to behave that way in Aperture 1.5. Has something changed? am I slightly retarded? Is it possible to bring up this picture with "surf" by searching for all pictures that contain "Water?"

You are right, you did see it done, and the keyword is associated with the image. But you are also right that you can't get it to behave that way because you are making a very common assumption, one that I made too, that Apple has fully implemented a keyword hierarchy. There is a partial workaround.

To illustrate what works and what doesn't, here is a simple keyword hierarchy:

I have a project called Vacation with some images I want to keyword, so I drag the Chicken keyword to the image of the chicken, the Ostrich keyword to the image of the ostrich, and the Cow keyword to the image of the cow. The other words you see below the thumbnails are the captions I added previously:

To see the full keyword information applied to each image I go to the metadata pane (Control D) and click on the Keywords button at the bottom and then selct an image:

This shows me that the Cow keyword is applied and gives its lineage.

So far so good. Now if I want to filter my Vacation project based on keywords I click on the search icon on the thumbnail window and select the Keywords checkbox:

But where are my keywords? Only the lowest level keywords are there: Chicken, Cow, and Ostrich. I can't filter by Bird or Mammal!

Until Apple fixes this, there is a partial workaround. Use the + menu top right to make the Text box visible and type the higher level keyword in there:

You can also do this by typing the keyword into the text box top right. But in either case, make sure that Limited Text Search is selected:

That restricts the search to just keywords, omitting EXIF, captions, etc. In Full Text Search mode, the filter below finds the cow, for instance, because the caption includes "Levi", the cow's name.

There is also a setting in the application preferences that selects what the initial search scope is for each project or smart album:

This workaround is not perfect. If I have another keyword section called Animal Crackers, then a text search I do on "Animal" will find all the images with keywords under Animal and all the images with keywords that are or are under Animal Crackers. So unless all the keywords are very carefully designed this rather limits the use of the hierarchy.

Tags: Aperture, Filtering, Keywords, Hierarchy, Q&A

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.

Tags: Aperture, Filtering