As you can see the blue september folder has photos in it directly, there used to be several projects in the september folder, now just the folders are there with no projects. Also you can see that April, May, June also have no disclosure triangles next to them indicating they have lost their projects as well. Other months may be missing some projects as well. Also note the project caelyn books near the bottom, this had books in it but is now empty. Ever see anything like this?

If you have projects disappearing but not the images they contain, then you probably have selected Recent Projects at the top of the library pane. Change that to Show All and everything will be back to normal.

Recent Projects will show projects and blue folders that have been recently modified. What is confusing is that clicking on the blue folders will show images, and yet there can be no projects inside the selected blue folder to contain them. For example, I have 2005 selected and images are visible:

Tags: Aperture, Q&A, Library, Projects, Lost Images

I have a question about moving/relocating vaults. I looked around your site, but haven't been able to find anything. I ran out of space on my external, where I store my vault just before xmas. So yesterday I bought a new external. It's only storing items I've put in my library since my last update on the old vault. I want to know how can I create a fresh new vault and store EVERYTHING in it on my new external? Do I need to remove my old vault from aperture? I appreciate any help.

There are two ways to move a vault: move it yourself and tell Aperture where it has moved to, or abandon the old vault and create a new one on the new drive. The former is more useful if you have moved a Firewire disk from one server to another and have not had to copy anything; the latter if you are moving to a new drive and have to copy the data anyway.

Here is an example of moving a vault. Here is my current vault:

I want to move it to a different volume. First I notice that it is not synced, so I click on the arrows button to do a sync:

And then I copy the vault to its new destination by using the Finder.

I have make the current vault go offline before Aperture will allow me to give a new location for it. If it were on an external drive I could do this easily: just unmount the drive and Aperture would note that. In my case it's on my internal hard drive, so I must move or rename it. I can't make any changes to it straight away because it is locked:

I unlock the file in the Finder by deselecting the Locked checkbox in the Finder's Get Info window (command I):

Now I move the file to a different place on my hard drive so that Aperture will not find it, then quit and relaunch Aperture. Now Aperture sees it as disconnected:

I am ready to tell Aperture where the vault has moved to. I select the vault in Aperture's vault pane, and from the cog menu bottom right I select Update Vault Path...

I navigate to the new location to tell Aperture where it is and can now use the vault as normal.

To delete the old vault, since the lock was removed, I just drag it to the trash and empty the trash. If I had moved to another hard drive then I would format the old drive immediately to make sure that it was impossible to get the vault on it confused with my new one.

Tags: Aperture, Q&A, Vaults, Moving

It's 2008 and I have imported Jan 1 photos but there is no 2008 blue folder under library like my previous years. These are not regular blue folders rather a double rectangle in blue with an asterisk in the bottem right corner. How is this created? Thanks. Great site!

Those are built-in smart albums and there is nothing you can do about them:

I never use them. If you find where they are defined and change them, then Aperture will put them back to their defaults. But you would think that 2008 would have been automatically created since it follows 2007. Every time, so far at least.

The fix is to make regular smart albums for years. I click on Library and create a new smart album like this:

By selecting the library first, the scope of this smart filter is the entire library. Renaming the new smart album and clicking on the magnifying glass gives me the filter dialog. Notice that the title says (Library), showing the scope. I could use the + pop-up top right to add a Date line to the filter and then set a range of dates:

But this is messy. Once the dates are entered they change to include the time and time zone. When I set up one for 2007 the filter did not find images I had shot during the last 8 hours of 2007. I am 8 hours behind UTC, so I assume that this filter works on UTC. Handy for those who require the same universal time comparison worldwide so that everyone agrees on when 2008 starts and ends, but not what I need.

So I go for the quick fix by selecting select EXIF from the + button top right and matching the Capture Year:

In both cases I select Ignore stack groupings in order to allow images inside stacks to be included.

Tags: Aperture, Q&A, Smart Albums, Library, Workflow, EXIF

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

Do you know how to reset all the metadata views back to their default designs?


The metadata view settings are kept in the user's Application Support folder. If you delete the file MetadataSets.plist, Aperture will create a new one with the default settings.

The Application Support folder in the Library which is inside the user's home folder. Aperture has its own folder. Mine looks like this:


This is also the home of many other settings for Aperture, including the keyword list, watermark images, and plug-ins. Sometimes these files are the cause of mysterious crashes on launch, so it can be a good test to rename the folder and relaunch Aperture to see if the problem goes away.

All these settings only apply to this user, note. There is another Application Support folder with an Aperture folder inside the Library on the boot disk. Here is mine:

BorderFX is here because it has an installer that put the plug-in in this central location. This gives access to the plug-in to all users of the machine. On my machine the Sample Projects folder is empty. That's because I trashed its contents after I had played with the images provided. It's worth checking to see if yours is wasting space and trashing the contents if it is.

Tags: Aperture, Q&A, Metadata, Metadata Views, Defaults, Plug-ins, Keywords

First, quickly, I love your site, and thank you for the useful information you have on it. Quick question: I have an aperture library with referenced masters. My library is approx. 13000 images, totaling approx 25GB. I do not automatically create previews for the images, in fact I periodically select all images and choose to delete previews. I only have previews for about 200 images that I sync to my iPhone. I use keywords, but not overwhelmingly; I do have Blue and Gray folder organizational structure within Aperture. I have very few smart albums/lightables/etc. Mostly I have 7-8 Blue (top level folders) with each shoot being a separate project under one of the Blue folders. So the question is, why is my ApertureLibrary.aplibrary file over 7GB in size? Thank you in advance for your help.

For 13,000 images, that works out to 540k each, about right in my estimation. The space is used mainly by the thumbnails that Aperture stores for each version.

Here I have a small project with 13 images, all referenced. None of them have previews. To look inside, I open my library with control-click and select Show Package Contents, then navigate down to the project and open that the same way:

Pretty much everything is small except for the AP.Minis and AP.Thumbnails files. The former holds 256 pixel thumbnails at 16 bits per pixel, 128K per image. The latter holds 1024 pixel JPEGs, about 415k each. The whole project is 7.3MB, so those two thumbnail files account for about 95% of the space used. This also shows why vaults are smaller than libraries: they omit the thumbnails.

Creating high resolution previews for these images would add somewhere between 2MB and 5MB per image, depending on the size and fidelity of the JPEGs generated. That would boost the project size by between 26MB and 65MB, a significant increase over the current 7.3MB.

The library has some overhead beyond the projects it contains. By opening the library with control click and Show Package Contents I can see the files at the top level:

The biggest non-project item is the database file at 2.2MB Not particularly significant in this 7GB library.

To a very rough approximation the library size is given by:

(number of managed masters * master size) + (number of versions * 500k) + (number of previews * 3MB)

Tags: Aperture, Q&A, Size, Library, Thumbnails, Previews

I have learned a ton from your site, thanks for providing it!! My question is this: I didn't know what I was doing when I originally imported my pictures into Aperture. Now I have a mix of some images managed and many are referenced. Do you have a pros/cons list of managed vs referenced? I have looked but haven't found a conclusive list. Thanks again for all your help!!

Here is my list of pros and cons for referenced and managed masters:

Pros for Managed

• No file management needed
• Low risk
• All masters backed up with the library
• Can use vaults for complete back up
• Always have everything with you

Cons for Managed

• Potentially huge library
• Other applications can't access images
• Can archive by project only
• Adding storage requires that everything is copied

Pros for Referenced

• Organize and store the masters where you like
• Access them from other applications
• Masters can be backed up separately from the rest of the system
• Potentially sharable among many users and systems
• Can archive in many different ways
• Can be simple and fast to add storage

Cons for Referenced

• Must organize, manage, and protect the masters
• Risk of being caught by permissions problems
• Risk of Aperture not reconnecting them
• Must remember to back them up separately from everything else
• Not all images are with you all of the time if using a laptop
• Vaults don't have all the data
• Offline referenced masters cause filter difficulties

Don't forget that combined schemes are also possible. You can keep most of your images referenced but the last few projects managed. Once you are done with the project, make its masters referenced. To help portability you can use high resolution previews as needed.

Tags: Aperture, Q&A, Managed, Referenced, Pros and Cons

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 am in the process of moving most of my work with photos to Aperture from iPhoto. I have been working with referenced files in Aperture with the master files staying in iPhoto. How can I move the master files to Aperture without de-stabilizing iPhoto?

You can do this very easily using Aperture's Consolidate command. Select the images and go to File > Consolidate Master... or for an entire project control click on the project and choose Consolidate Masters for Project...:

While consolidating usually moves the master files into the Aperture library (so causing iPhoto grief), there is an option to copy the files instead. This leaves the originals intact:

Of course now you have two masters on your disk, one in iPhoto and one in Aperture. Once you have confirmed that Aperture has the photos in its library as expected, you can delete the iPhoto copies.

Tags: Aperture, Q&A, iPhoto, Referenced, Consolidate

I have a website where I post my photos and with every photo a "saying". When I manage my photos in Aperture I add the "Saying title" in the metadate "Byline Title" field and the saying in the metadata "Byline" field. So far so good. Now I want to make a book but when I add a "Metadata Box" I´m not able to pick the Byline Title or Byline in the "Set Metadata Format" option. Can this easily be fixed or what?

In a word, no. The choices given are the only ones available. Your only practical option at this point is to move or copy the metadata to one of the available choices before you import into Aperture. There are no capabilities inside Aperture for moving or copying metadata between fields automatically.

When laying out a book, metadata boxes can be added and linked to images. Having selected the Edit Layout mode and clicked on an image, the Add Metadata button (center) creates the box:

The metadata box is linked to the selected image and includes the data shown by the tag:

There is a drop-down menu that allows the contents to be changed:

Only this small selection of possible metadata can be displayed. The only way to get more data is to move it into the available fields.

But I have never been able to get anything to appear for the Title, Author, or Copyright selections. It's as though Apple has simply missed something out here.

Tags: Aperture, Q&A, Metadata, Books, Bugs

Hello, I'd like to combine the contents of a few folders; however, some file names are the same, therefore, I can't add them all together. Is there a way to "automatically" rename the files so that they can all share the same folder space? I don't want to go inside each folder and change the name of files one by one!

There is a way to do this automatically, and surprisingly the tool that can do it is Aperture. The files do have to be image files that Aperture can read.

Here is a folder structure with two folders that contain different images with the same name, Mud.jpg:

I'll move these two images into a single folder in such a way that the names don't clash.

The first step is to import my two folders, Monday and Tuesday, one at a time, into the same Aperture project.

First I create a new project called Temp, then select it and press command I to bring up the Import pane. At the top of the import window I select the first image folder:

And make sure that the import is going to the right place:

Then I select a referenced import that leaves the files in their current location. This is an important step -- I don't want to move the files yet:

After performing the import, my Temp project has the images from the Monday folder, just one in this case, but it could be thousands. Here is the image in the project with the badge that tells me it is referenced:

Next I do another import into Temp using the Tuesday folder, making sure that I import referenced again. I could repeat this with many more folders of images if I wanted, all with clashing image names.

To combine the folders, I relocate the images in the Temp project to another part of the disk, in this case a folder called All Mud. I control-click on the Temp project and select Relocate masters for Project...:

And provide the destination folder in the dialog. I don't need any subfolders and I don't want to rename the files in any special way, so I select None and Master Filename from the pop-ups:

The relocation of the files is fast because they don't have to be copied if they are being moved into a folder on the same disk, as is the case here.

Once the relocation is complete, I see that the original Mud folder is now empty:

And the All Mud folder has the images:

Aperture renames with numbers in brackets; there is no choice about that. Not only are the masters in the same folder, but they are already imported into Aperture. I am done. If at any time I want to store then as managed masters in the Aperture library I can use the consolidate function of Aperture to do this.

Tags: Aperture, Q&A, Relocate, Consolidate, Folders, Name Collisions

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

I am very frustrated when I go into aperture and look at my pictures I look at the previews on the bottom and there are a lot of preview photos are the wrong photo. When I click on the photo a different photo comes into the view screeen. What can I do to fix this I tried holding option and command while I started aperture and it said it was regenerating. Afterwards still the same result. Any other suggestions? Also when I click on library now nothing displays in the view window? THanks

It looks like your thumbnails have been corrupted. Rebuilding the database won't fix that, so you'll need to delve into the affected library. It's easy to fix.

Another symptom of corrupted thumbnails is that they look like this:

To fix, quit Aperture and locate the Aperture library with the problem. Control-click on the library icon and select Show Package Contents:

A Finder window will open. Navigate down through the folders (they correspond to the blue folders in your Aperture library) until you get to the project with the problem thumbnails:

Open that project with a control-click Show Package Contents and locate these three files:

Drag those to trash, or select them and hit command-delete.

Close the windows that you opened, and launch Aperture. Aperture will immediately start regenerating the thumbnails, and that could take a little while. To see what it is doing, click on Window > Show Tasks List and you'll get a count-down of the number of images still to process:

When it is done, all should be well, at least with that project. You'll need to repeat this with each affected project in the library.

Tags: Q&A, Aperture, Thumbnails, Library, Corruption

First off I want to thank you for your website it has been very very helpful to me, since I am a beginner to using Aperture and I was getting fed up with the master files and organizing, but know I understand all of that completely. My only question is that in your screenshots for your library section for Aperture, next to all of your projects it shows how many pictures are in every one. I was wondering how did you do that?

Turn on the display of the number of versions in the Aperture preferences:

When you have it turned on, the library shows the number of versions in each project like this:

That version count includes all versions, including those in stacks. So you may have 100 versions in a project, but only 5 images that are really different, the other 95 being the non-pick stack items.

Tags: Q&A, Aperture, Projects, Versions

I am a photographer and travel to various "Locations." I am having a workflow problem with Aperture and image storage. It seems to me that there is probably an easy fix either in Aperture or in modifying my workflow but the Apple discussion group is unable to grasp my problem. One kind responder pointed me to your site and so perhaps you would allow me to ask my question. While traveling I download from the camera to my laptop MacBook Pro each day. Dependent upon opportunities I sometimes need to download from the SD cards directly to a Wolverine battery operated hard drive while continuing to shoot. I then copy from the Wolverine to my MB Pro at the end of the day. I use Aperture to rate, cull, add keywords, put into projects etc etc. As the laptop's hard drive is too small to store all of my images i usually need to make additional DVD backups of my images and erase the files from my laptop. This is where the problem starts.

After I erase the master files the images and ratings etc still appear in Aperture but of course the images show as off line. Upon returning home I copy all of my images onto my eSATA hard drives (from DVD or from Wolverine). Now I want to have Aperture look for the master images on the eSATA drive and re connect, but cannot figure out how to do this. The only solution I have so far is to re do the rating, culling, keywords etc referencing the images on the eSATA drive and erase the older versions. This besides being time consuming is for me fraught with peril. My administrative skills are almost non existent.

You can reconnect the copied masters with the Referenced File Manager. I have an article that describes how to do this called Burning Masters To DVD and The Referenced File Manager. However, you can make all of this workflow faster and less perilous by working with complete projects rather than individual masters. And you won't have to go near the Referenced File Manager to do it.

As you import images into the Aperture library on your laptop, make the projects fairly small. Do your rating and sorting. When your laptop is too full, export these projects a few at a time.

You can check that the projects look OK by dropping them onto an open TextWrangler document and seeing if the expected files are present:

Looks good to me. Also check the size of the project in the Finder as a sanity check:

My project has 18 images of about 2.5MB each, so that looks right.

Burn as many as will fit onto a DVD, verify the DVD, and then delete the project in the Aperture library and empty the trash. Emptying the trash is necessary because the deleted masters in the projects will be moved there. Repeat with all the projects you want to move. You'll have to come up with a foolproof scheme for naming these projects so there is no chance of deleting the wrong thing.

Now when you get back into the office, just import the projects into Aperture's library. That's it. Mount the DVD and drag the projects to the library:

If you trust that the keywords coming in with the projects are well-behaved (ie match the scheme you are using, have the correct spelling etc.) then before importing the projects, unlock the keyword HUD by bringing it up with shift H and clicking the lock icon. This will give the newly-imported images the same keywords are are already used in the library. If you leave the keyword HUD locked, the imported keywords will be added to a separate keyword hierarchy called Imported Keywords and have to be merged later.

The big advantage of using projects to move images around is that they are self-contained. They include all the masters, versions, keywords, ratings, albums, adjustments, and everything else needed to work instantly as soon as they are put back into the library. They even contain thumbnails, so you won't have to wait for them to be regenerated once you are back in the office.

Tags: Aperture, Q&A, Masters, Laptop, Workflow, Projects, Reconnecting

Great site of Aperture how-to's and tips. A question for you. In a book, special occasion template, how does one change the color of all those colored boxes? What are those boxes, If I drag one from one page to another the color seems to vanish, though the selection handles are still there.

Here is an example of the colored boxes in that theme:

The colored boxes in the Special Occasion book are defined in the Aperture application itself. They are part of the theme, and so unless you hack into the theme by opening up the Aperture application bundle and edit plists, you cannot change them. You can, however get rid of them and add your own without any hacking.

If you do want to hack, then open the Aperture application with a control click and select Show Package Contents. Navigate to the folder Contents > Resources > Book Themes > Special Occasion > Hardcover > Graphics and you will see that it holds the files that define the blue rectangle and other things:

The BlueRect plist file contains just this, as shown by the plist editor:

and can be easily modified. However any modification will be lost if you update Aperture, so this is not advised.

To replace the blue rectangles with your own creation, you will need a colored graphic. Just a plain color square made in PhotoShop or some other utility will work fine. Perhaps you have some already available.

Here is is how I do it with ImageWell. I launch ImageWell and click Edit and delete anything that is there by selecting it and pressing delete:

I click on the rounded rectangle top left and drag the rectangle onto the editing area:

And change the size using the numbers bottom left to something that is big enough for print, say 3000 x 3000 pixels. I click the small rectangle on the right just below the yellow rectangle in the image above:

This opens the color picker and lets me pick a nice color. I don't have to be particularly fussy with my choice as you will see. I also set the border width to zero by editing the number bottom right:

I click the ImageWell icon top left to go back to the main window and give the image a name. Then I click and drag the image to the desktop.

Now I have my green image I import it into Aperture (just dragging onto a project works) and then drag the Aperture thumbnail to my book album. Here it is:

In my book I change to editing the layout:

and click on the blue rectangle I want to change. A right-click and a Cut removes it:

To put in the color I want, I create a new photo box and drag in my color image:

And there it is in the book:

If I don't like it, I can always change it. I just click on the thumbnail image and adjust the color and lightness using the controls in the HUD:

Adjusting the thumbnail will affect all the boxes that show that same color image, so I can adjust the look of the whole book with just a few HUD sliders. I can work with multiple versions of the same starting image and adjust each of them independently to vary the color scheme in many ways. This same method can be used to set background colors and patterns as well, of course.

Tags: Aperture, Color, Boxes, Books, Q&A, Hacking, Templates, Themes, Backgrounds

I have found your Aperture articles to be very useful, thanks for taking the time to post them. Quick question for you about your advanced importing article. When you did the following: 'In this case I have elected to copy the master files into a folder called Dogs' Is there any way to tell Aperture to ignore duplicate images and only import/copy the new ones to the 'Dogs' folder? This was a handy feature that Canon's CameraWindow provided and I got into the habit of using it (I don't always delete all the images from my photo card after an import).

Aperture does not ignore duplicates when they are imported, as you and many others have discovered. Certainly this is a feature of iView and many other image cataloging applications. Why not Aperture as well?

It's simply that Aperture is not an image cataloging application: it's an image library application. It includes cataloging features, (including a catalog) as all libraries do, but there is more to it that that. The difference is that a catalog tells you where something is while a library stores it for you as well. It gets confusing when referenced image masters are involved. The addition of referenced masters makes Aperture look just like a cataloging application in some ways. But really referenced masters are a part of the library just as much as managed masters are. It is only their storage that is different.

Having said that, I do agree that having an "ignore already imported images" button on the import pane would be very useful. I just don't see how it could be reliably implemented. How does Aperture know that the image has already been imported? If it gets it wrong, you will lose images and be much madder than a few duplicates could ever make you.

Tags: Aperture, Q&A, Importing

Sorry to bother you again with a quick question. I've imported all my old images, and groped the similar shots into stacks, and closed the stacks to reduce the number of images shown. Now I'm going through and applying keywords, but the keywords I select are only being applied to the pick of the stack, not the whole stack. Any idea how to apply the keyword to the whole stack? I've tried the "primary only" toggle and that doesn't seem to be it.

Yes, metadata should really be a stack attribute, not an image attribute, but there is nothing we can do about that. The real answer is to set up your workflow so that you stack last. Apple seems to think that doing it first is the way to go but my experience is the opposite -- there are just too many gotchas. Do absolutely everything you normally do to your photos and then stack them. Or better still, stack only the good ones. There is usually no point wasting time on the one and two star images taken at the same time: they are still accessible simply by displaying thumbnails in time order.

To quickly access stacks (and only stacks) to apply metadata, do this:

1. Open all the stacks with option ' (apostrophe)
2. Go to the top with Home
3. Select one image in the first stack and press command E. That extends the selection, selecting all of the images in the stack
4. Drag keywords from the keyword HUD and they will apply to all of the images in that stack
5. Hit option Page Down. That takes you to the next stack and selects all of its contents.
6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 as many times as you need
7. Close all the stacks with option ; (semi colon)

Tags: Aperture, Stacks, Keywords, Q&A

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

Love your site and have enjoyed learning Aperture. My problem occurs while I am working in a book or light table.    When I click on an image that is small in my browser I cannot for the life of me find a way to look at that image alone in a viewer so I can edit it.    I can open it in photoshop, but not separately in Aperture.  In any other kind of folder clicking on a image shows it larger in the viewer.  But in the book or Light table layouts all you see is the book or light table.  It is frustrating to need to do a quick edit, but not be able to quickly see the image larger on the screen.    In I photo I was able to double click on the image, see it large, edit it and go back into the book.  In Aperture I have to search for the image in a different browser to see it large enough to edit it. What am I missing? Suggestions?

You are missing the F key. Pressing F will display the selected thumbnail (one or many) full screen. There images can be adjusted via the HUD.

There is a second way that involves less clicking if you have a number of images to view and/or edit. The grid browser includes this icon when working on a book or light table:

Click it to select and it will replace the book or light table viewer with the standard image viewer. Work on your images and click it again to get the book or light table back.

The lock icon to the right will lock the viewer to this browser. This is useful if you have multiple browsers open and want to look through them while keeping the book or light table on the screen.

This Full Screen article shows how useful the full screen mode is. This Laying Out A Book article has an example of creating a new image version and editing it while in book view. And Working With Multiple Browsers shows all the ways that multiple browsers can be usefully employed.

Tags: Aperture, Q&A, Workspace

Of course I like your website.. :) Great articles that help a lot. So I had a question of my own, to which I hope you have an answer; Is it possible to remove any of those 'smart' albums under 'Library'?

Yes it is possible. But no, I don't know how to do it, or more importantly if you should do it.

What I do know is that these built-in smart albums are in every library and are built in to the Aperture application itself. If you remove them from a library, Aperture will put them back.

You can see them in Aperture by opening the application with a control-click and selecting Show Package Contents. Open the Resources folder and look for the FactoryLibraryQueries folder. I don't know the consequences of removing or editing them, so beware of making any modifications.

Tags: Q&A, Aperture, Library, Smart Albums

Hi! Thanks for a great site! I'm thinking about switching from iView Media Pro to Aperture. What I'm curios about is if Aperture has the same abilities to tag photos with all the IPTC data that iView has? And also, is there any good ways to sort photos by people or location. Do I have to use keywords to do that, or is there any dedicated fields for this? I'd like to see a full walk through of all the searching/filtering/tagging capabilities Aperture have, could you point me in the right direction for a great source on that?

Three questions in all. Quick answers: Yes, Aperture can tag with all the IPTC data that iView has. No, it is not possible to sort by person or location like iView, but some sorting is possible. Yes, I can point you in the right direction. See the articles on this site that cover metadata and filtering workflow.

IPTC Tagging

The IPTC tags can most easily be seen in the filter dialog. Select IPTC from the plus pop-up on the filter dialog:

and then click on the IPTC pop-up that appears:

You can also control which IPTC fields appear in the various metadata sets by editing the metadata sets in the Inspector panel. Open the metadata panel with I and pick one of the metadata sets. Then select IPTC at the bottom to get an opportunity to add or remove them from the set:

The batch change dialog (command shift B) also allows the selection of All IPTC in order to make bulk changes to image metadata:

Sorting Features

The sorting features of Aperture are not as comprehensive as iView, and that is a problem. Sometimes it is very convenient to sort all images by person, or city, or some other random metadata.

In the grid view, Aperture allows sorting on only eight pieces of data:

This is a very restricting set. The keywords sort order is not useful because it sorts on the entire comma-separated string of all the keywords applied to an image. So two images each tagged with Bob and Annie will sort differently if they are tagged with other keywords as well. There is no way to tell Aperture to sort on People and have People > Bob and People > Annie be compared to create the sort order.

In the list view, selected by clicking the icon to the left of the sort pop-up:

there are many more options. Any column can be used to sort by clicking on the header (except the tags -- that does not work). Here I sort on aperture:

But I can only sort on one column. So I cannot keep the sort by aperture and also sort by shutter speed.

The list view can be modified too. From the inspector, select the List - Expanded metadata set:

and then add or remove entries. Ensure that the expanded list is used by pressing Command J and checking the view options:

There is set 2 for the list view columns selected as List - Expanded. By adding fields to the list view it is possible to sort on any of the IPTC or EXIF field. If you have only one person in the frame and have used an IPTC field to identify that person, then yes, you can sort by person.

Also note that if you select one of the columns in list view and then change back to grid view, that selection stays:

At least for a little while. If you select away from it, it disappears from the pop-up.

Tags: Q&A, Aperture, IPTC, iView, Keywords

I´ve got a question when saving Images. I can relocated masters, and when I´m doing it I can create naming presets. Like folder/Project and so on. So here´s my question: Aperture only takes the foldername of the first folder in the hierarchy. Subfolder doens´t appears. When my pics are in (Bluefolder)Party/(Bluefolder)X-mas/(Project)2005 Aperture could only saves it this way (Folder)Party/(Folder)2005. Did I something wrong?

You didn't do anything wrong -- that's all there is. While the folder naming preset features of Aperture are flexible, they are also limited.

Folder naming presets are used by Aperture to create folder hierarchies for exported or relocated files. To access the folder naming presets go to File > Export > Export Versions and pick Edit... from the Subfolder Format popup:

Here is what you have to work with:

The buttons can be dragged up to the format line, and the format line can be edited and have words added. Each time a forward slash / is added another folder level will be created. The limitation with the scheme as currently implemented (Aperture 1.5.1) is that Folder Name refers to only the highest level blue folder that the image is located in.

So in this example hierarchy exporting an image from the Crops smart album will result in a Folder Name that is called Blog. Not Coyote, not Tree Cutting:

Using the Folder folder file setting defined above, a version called freddy.jpg will get saved as Blog/Blog/freddy.jpg. Not so helpful. If you want to use multiple levels then you have to use different criteria, such as Year/Folder/Project Name.

But don't forget that you can enter you own names too, so it is possible to create hierarchies like Clients/Atlanta/Year/Folder Name/Project Name where Clients and Atlanta are your own names. This could be saved under the a preset called Atlanta Clients by Year and Project.

Tags: Q&A, Aperture, Relocate, Masters, Folders

My case: I am a theater photographer. I take hundreds of photo from each performance in many different CF disks. For each show, I make one project in Aperture. I assign a name for each project and when I import the photos I give a custom name for my Master files with counter. for the first project, everything is all right. I get counters started with 1 and goes on. But the problem starts when I want to import photos for the second Project. here I want my master files have a new custom name with new counters. I get the new custom name but the counter does not start from 1. It starts with the next figure that last project's photo. Please advise. How can I have different projects with different counters. Have this in mind that each of my projects have more that 1000 picture in it.

You can do this by using a counter on import and resetting its value each time you create a new project. Aperture does not have counters that are tied to the projects, so this is the only way to achieve what you are trying to do.

On the import pane is an area where the name can be modified as it is imported:

At the bottom of the pop-up for the Version Name is an option to edit the presets. That brings up a dialog that allows you to construct the presets out of various elements:

Among the choices are three different counters that can be added to file names when images are imported: a sequence number, an index number, or a counter.

A sequence number is expressed as index of total like "5 of 86". It starts at one and increases for each image imported. Each import resets the sequence number.

An index number starts at 1 and increases for each image imported. Each import resets the index number.

A counter initially starts at 1 and does not get reset by each import. So each image gets a different number irrespective of how or when it was imported.

As can be seen above, the dialog gives the opportunity to set the starting value of the counter to any number, so this is how it can be reset for a new project. It also allows going back to an old project and adding more images: set the counter starting value to one greater than the highest-numbered image in that project. It would be nice if Aperture offered a project-based counter, but so far it does not.

Tags: Aperture, Q&A, Importing, Masters

Maybe a stupid/simple question: So I am viewing a project in fullscreen, and I want to flag certain interesting photos so I can look at them later for editing or export. How do I do this?

If keywords are sufficient for your need to mark images, then they can be added easily in full screen mode. The method I am about to describe works outside of full screen mode too. It is just not obvious that it does work in full screen mode because the controls are hidden.

Let's assume you want to mark the images for adjustment and so will use a keyword Action > Adjust to mark them. Make sure the viewer is visible (press V if it is not), bring up the Keyword Controls with shift D:

and select Edit Buttons...

Add the keyword Adjust in a convenient place

And add that keyword to one of the button sets. I am adding it to my Action button set:

Now click OK to close the dialog (maybe locking the keywords) and look at the Keyword Controls bottom right. Scroll through the sets with the period and comma keys until you get to the set with the Adjust keyword:

In this example it is attached to the 6 key. Option 6 adds it and shift option 6 removes it.

When you view your images full screen, make sure you have the correct button set displayed, and then as you navigate through the images press option 6 to mark for adjusting. If you have metadata display turned off you will see no change to the image. All selected images displayed in full screen will have the keyword added unless Primary Only (S key) is turned on. You can of course use multiple keywords set up for different keys and tag with any number of them.

It is possible to combine this technique with a smart album and negative filtering to make all marked images vanish from the current album as they are marked. This is handy when you are trying to reduce a set of images down to a predefined number.

Tags: Q&A, Aperture, Full Screen, Keywords

I'm very new to Aperture, and am still struggling with stacks, though. My problem is that I'd like to put multiple versions of a single photo in a stack, cropped for different print sizes (with keywords of "5x7", "8x10", &c). But I also want to use stacks for selecting the best shot of several similar ones. My problem comes when I want to do both: Stack several shots together, but have multiple versions of the "pick." How do you do this without getting very confused?

[Update: A reader pointed out to me that filters on regular albums do include stacks that have members matching the filter. This behavior is not the same as projects (no match) or smart albums (match and extract images). I have amended the article to include this].

It is not obvious, but Aperture already does this for you: if you put images in a stack and then create versions, those versions are grouped with the originals. But there is a twist: if you leave the variations in the stack then a regular project filter cannot find them. The only way to find them is with an album: a smart album will find and extract the images; a regular album will find the images in the stack, but not extract them.

Look at this rather contrived example. Here are four images in a stack, with the pick on the left:

I want to manage two different crops of each of these. I'll make the crops really obvious so they can be distinguished in this example: one set of crops will be vertical and the other set horizontal. In real life they would have more realistic aspect ratios. I will start with the pick. I duplicate the version and drag it out of the stack (option drag does that in one step):

Then I crop it and keyword it:

Then duplicate the same original with option drag and crop it again, this time vertically, and keyword it:

Now I repeat that for the other images in the stack, just leaving them loose in the project:

A big mess. But that is OK because they are tagged and have the same file name as the originals. I can still find anything I need.

To find all the cropped images based on, say, the third image in the stack I have to do some filtering. Selecting that image and bringing up the inspector with control D lets me look at the file name (add the file name to the display using instructions here if it is not visible):

I copy the file name from the field: "Pine tree chopping22.JPG" and paste it into the project's filter dialog in the Other Metadata section:

And select is as the condition:

Here are the resulting images:

Notice that the original does not show up. That's because it is inside a stack in a project -- and only albums can see inside stacks. That is why I left the cropped versions loose in the project.

That found all of the crops based on one image, now what about the opposite: all of the images with one crop? To find all the horizontal images I filter on that keyword in the project. Since the cropped versions are loose in the project they are found:

Now let's do an experiment and see what happens if I tidy up the loose images. I select them all and hit command K to create a new stack:

Those grey rectangles inside the new stack have collected together images that are derived from the same original. What happens if I drag all of that stack into the original stack? This:

The originals and their versions are neatly grouped together! This is great, except that filtering the project on Horizontal now gets me this:

Nothing. Since this is a project filter and the pick does not match Horizontal, the whole stack is ignored. So I have to create an album.

A regular album will find any stacks that include the keyword, but will not extract the images. This tells me where to look, but not what to look at. In this case it is not very useful because every stack with a horizontal crop will be included along with all the other crops available in those stacks.

A smart album will match the keyword I specify and will extract the images. To create the smart album I select the project (important because I want the scope of the filter to be limited to that project):

And select the keyword I need, and check the Ignore Stack Groupings checkbox. That is the magic that lets the filter look inside the stacks and extract the images:

And as you can see, the four horizontal images have been displayed. But now I have lost my stacking information: which one was the pick? That is an inconvenient, but not unworkable problem.

So there are some trade-offs in the way that Aperture has implemented filtering and displaying stacks. I would do everything inside the stacks and have no loose images. I say that because the most important selection will be of the image. The crop follows. Once you have found the image in the stack that you want you can click on the crops and look at the metadata to pick the one you need.

Tags: Aperture, Q&A, Stacks, Adjustments, Versions

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

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

First off, your site is quite an excellent resource. Well done and keep up the good work! I have one question, which I'm hoping you know the answer to. I'm trying to move my Vault over to a network drive, but Samba doesn't seem to be able to handle the : characters inside the .appproject packages. Did you ever encounter this problem? If so, how did you get around it? If not, have you any ideas how I would get around this?

If the filing system were NFS+ and the connection AFP (Appletalk) then the answer would be in the article Network Vaults that describes how to create a vault on a server when Aperture refuses to allow it. However the question at hand is how to handle a file server running Samba (SMB/CIFS), and possibly a foreign filing system like NTFS where there are problems with the file names.

The answer is to create a disk image on the server and put the vault inside that. Exposing Aperture to a filing system that cannot handle the Mac path names results in errors like this:

By creating a disk image on the server the server sees a single large binary file and the Mac sees a complete HFS+ filing system.

There are two types of disk image that could be used for this: standard are sparse. A standard disk image (.dmg) has a fixed image file size and a fixed capacity. It behaves just like a regular physical disk. A sparse disk image (.sparseimage) has a fixed capacity, but its image file size varies with the amount of data it is holding. The one catch with sparse disk images is that they don't get any smaller when data is deleted from them. In either case, when the disk is full, you have to create another, bigger one. Both types of disk image can also be encrypted.

I recommend using a sparse disk image. Create one on your server by launching Disk Utility. Make sure nothing on the left pane is selected and then select File > New > Blank Disk Image.

Select sparse disk image from the pop-up and then specify the size. Pick something that is big enough to hold what you will need for the foreseeable future, but not so big that it will cause problems on your server when it is full-sized. Be aware that Aperture requires quite a lot of space held in reserve to be sure that it can write or update a vault.

If you want to encrypt the disk, do so. You can store the key in your keychain if you like. But make sure you don't lose the key or you will lose your data forever:

Navigate to your server and create the image there. Once you have created your disk image you will have a file that looks like this:

Even very large sparse disk images are small to start with. A 100GB sparse disk image is tens of MB in size when empty. To use the disk image, you must mount it. Just double-click it and it will appear on your desktop with your other drives:

Now you can create your vault on that mounted disk image drive:

Giving it a sensible name:

To unmount the volume, control click and select unmount. If you drag to trash, be careful to drag the volume to the trash, not the sparse disk image file to trash.

When your vault becomes too big for your sparse disk image delete it by deleting the sparse image file and emptying the trash. Now create a new bigger image with the same name and create a new vault on it.

Tags: Aperture, Vaults, Networking, Samba, Q&A, Disk Images

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

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

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

[Regarding previews] Do you know where they are located and can this be customized?  I would love to have my library in the external FW drive and have the previews in my local drive, so when I travel, I can always have a small size replica of all my images.  

Previews are stored in the Aperture Library and that cannot be changed. I have some details of exactly how and where in an article on Preview Storage. However, there are a couple of ways of achieving what you want to do.

The first is to copy out the previews from the library each time you want to travel. If you have iView then quit Aperture and drop your Library file onto the iView icon and let it catalog. It will find all your originals and two sizes of preview, one at full size (or whatever you selected in Aperture's prefs), and one at 240x240. Use iView's search features to isolate the previews by finding those created after a certain date, or of a certain type (previews are JPG), or of a certain size, or some other salient features that will work. Once isolated you can use iView's copy tool to duplicate the selection on your laptop. This will also give you an incremental solution because you will be able to see the date you last updated your laptop by examining the file dates and use that to filter the iView results.

The second is to change the way you are working. Put your library on your laptop, complete with previews, and store the originals as referenced images on your Firewire drive. This will mean that you no longer have to make copies and manage the previews so much. If you also have a desktop machine then you can also have a library on that and have it reference the same images on your Firewire drive.

Tags: Aperture, Previews, Library, Q&A

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Tags: Q&A