Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
Projects
Within an Aperture library, you will group your master files and versions into projects. A project
might represent an entire shoot, multiple shoots of the same subject, a part of a shoot, or just a
completely random collection of images. Each time you import an image, you must determine
into what project to place it. If you delete a project, you are removing the master files contained
within it from your library. There is no limit on how many projects you can create.
Albums
Albums are a collection of image versions that you create manually. Versions may exist in more
than one album (for example, you might put an image in both a
Brooks Wedding Dinner
album and
a
Show to Bride
album). Albums can either exist within a project to provide a finer-grained group-
ing of images or at a library level if they contain images from multiple projects. For example, we
typically create a project for a shoot such as
Japan - February 2010
and then create albums within
the project to represent specific parts of the shoot such as
Tsurui Day 3 AM
. Later, we create a
library-level album, such as
Images to Copyright
, containing images from every project that we
need to submit for copyright registration. No matter how many albums within a library you put an
image into, Aperture will not create a new copy of the master file on disk. Furthermore, deleting an
image from an album does not remove it from your library or hard drive.
There are special types of albums, called Smart Albums, whose contents are created dynamically.
For example, Aperture has built-in Smart Albums at the library level (called Library Albums) for
5-star images (the highest rating you can give), videos, images created in the last week, and more.
Each time you add or adjust an image and make it meet one of these criteria, such as rating an
image with 5 stars, Aperture automatically adds it to the appropriate Smart Album. Smart Albums
are covered in depth in Chapter 4.
Folders
A folder is a container for projects, albums, and other folders. As you create more and more proj-
ects, you may find it helpful to use folders to group related projects together so that you're not
always scrolling through a long list of projects. For example, we have a folder in our library called
Kiteboarding (shown in Figure 1.6) that contains folders for each beach we shoot at, and those
subfolders contain our projects. We also have albums within the Kiteboarding folder (and not a
child folder) with images of specific riders pulled from all the beaches we've shot each rider at.
Stacks
While not strictly part of Aperture's hierarchy, Aperture calls a small collection of images that are
related in some way a
stack
. The difference between a stack and a project or album is that a stack
of images tends to essentially be one image, but just slightly different versions of that image,
whereas a project or album might contain many stacks of images.
