I’m going to try producing a series of presentations in various media to document and share some of the tricks I’ve learned in my playing with digital photography. There are lots of other resources out there, so I’m not going to try to be canonical or exhaustive, but will try to answer some of the questions that people ask me.
This first episode is mostly just an intro/warmup for me, and I picked a basic topic: project and album management in Aperture 2.
Episode 1: Aperture 2 Project and Album Management weighs in at 10.20 MB, and clocks in at 8:24.
Digital Photography Sessions – Episode 1 (320×240, 10.2MB)
I originally started my new life with Mac using Aperture based on your raving. I abandoned it after about 10 days for iPhoto. Now I’ll give it another shot.
The whole project/folder/album deal still has me somewhat flustered, which is a bit the case with iPhoto. While I used Picasa in my Windows world and it tried to use albums, I stuck with my basic windows file management to sort things a bit like you have. I had seasons, Winter 2008, Spring 2008 etc. Your management system seems similar to mine. I’m loading Aperture as I write.
Thanks for doing this. I love the fact your episode is 001. Only 998 more to go.
This is a great extension of some of the things we were talking about on the Posse podcast, and I’m really excited that you started this project. I hope you continue the tutorials. This one actually covered some stuff I’ve been wondering about with regards to organizing photos in Aperture. I was planning on bugging you with Aperture questions at TLt, but these tutorials might save me the trouble.
My only tip for organization is that when I import photos from the camera, I have Aperture put them into a directory for the year, with subfolders for month and date. I feel a bit more secure about the photo library if I can see the individual files in the Finder.
Keep the tutorials coming. I’ll be waiting for the next one.
thanks, guys. I’ve got some ideas for stuff I want to try. hopefully it turns out not sucking, and comes in handy for others.
was the video too tiny for this? should I give up on resizing a fullscreen capture into 320×240?
@rob I thought about using referenced masters, but I’d been using iPhoto since 1.0 and am pretty comfortable in trusting the monolithic library storage system. It’s not completely opaque, though – all files are exposed within my Aperture Library bundle. If I ever need to pull the files out, I can do it pretty easily. But, the hardest part of leaving Aperture wouldn’t be the loss of the Library, it would be the metadata, albums and processing applied to the RAW files. That’s much harder to reproduce than a folder-based filesystem…
Another advantage I’ve found with file based is the import is easier. There is (as seen lately on Twitter) some confusion about what are folders, projects and albums. I think I’m starting to understand this and I like your idea of a 2008 project, with various albums/smart albums within it.
I found the video too tiny and ended up doubling the window size. That does have the disadvantage of increasing the file size by about a factor of 4. If you are storing the video on your own server, you may find the space fills up very quickly. If you are going to go larger it might be a good idea to find a third party hosting system for your video (like archive.org maybe?).
I put the original size movie on the server as well – it’s surprisingly not much fatter than the small one.
I’m still having issue with exporting to flickr as a preview size. What’s your solution? Is there more than one way?
If you drag from Aperture to something like Flickr Uploadr, you’re only uploading the JPEG preview that Aperture generates for onscreen viewing – not the original or fullsize version of the file.
I use the excellent FlickrExport for Aperture and it does all the uploading automatically – no drag/drop or exporting versions to upload, it’s all handled within Aperture. There is a “Lite” version for free, but the full version is well worth the money.