Re-generate broken thumbnails within a project

Sometimes, you might notice that thumbnails disappear when you move images from one project to another, and in their place, you'll see a gray representation of the photo with a white, dashed border.

Instead of clicking on the missing thumbnails one by one, or selecting several of them, and then re-generating the thumbnails via the Menu, try to change the project name to something else, and then back again.

I did the project re-naming trick several times to rebuild just the missing thumbnails, and it worked like a charm.

The best way to apply image adjustments

In order to make the best use of your computer's processing cycles and reduce the occurrence of "beach balls" or the system hanging up, RB advises to turn off all other adjustments while working on the current adjustment. This is especially true of some adjustments such as noise reduction, sharpen, straighten, highlights and shadows:

So what to do about it? Simple do some of these things last. If you want to tweak one of these turn the others off while you are doing it. For instance if you want to tweak noise reduction there is no reason to have edge sharpen turned on while you are playing around with noise. I picked those two because some of you may instantly react that there is a reason – of course there is a reason to look at the over all effect when everything is added together – What I am getting at is that it may be more productive to get the optimal settings for these processing intensive heavyweights individually while getting real-time feedback rather than having Aperture reprocess all the pixels through all of them while driving you insane that there is a 5 second delay between you moving the slider and anything happening.

How to efficiently apply keywords to all images within a Stack

Bagelturf's methods are the best.

If not already open, you'll need to expand the stack with shift+k, then hit cmd+e to select all the photos in the stack, then apply the keyword or keywords.

Another efficient way is to go directly to the next stack via option+page-up or option+page-down (option+fn+arrow-up or option+fn+arrow-down on Mac notebooks or Apple keyboards which do not feature the Page Up and Page Down keys), which will not only open up the stack, but select all the photos therein in one fell swoop.

Hit option+; to close all stacks.

How to manage Previews

O'Reilly has a screencast on managing previews in Aperture.

The 13.27 MB screencast can be downloaded as a Quicktime .mov file.

The most helpful thing I got from the screencast is understanding how preview images are used by applications outside of Aperture.

In the example, Derrick Story shows you how you can integrate Aperture preview images with iPhoto in order to make postcards and greeting cards with them.

Some of the highlights of the movie are:

1. 0:000:22 – How to define the quality and size of the Preview images.
2. 00:03:18 – The difference between Update Preview and Generate Preview. Update Preview tends to get processed in the background. Use Generate Preview if you want the Preview to be updated immediately.
3. 00:04:49 – Show the Aperture Library from within iPhoto.

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It is assumed that the current structure from which you're moving is one where photos are organized by Year only, and that you don't wish to preserve Aperture-specific metadata such ratings, captions and the like in the process.

In essence, we're starting from scratch.

Specifically, the objective of this Aperture tutorial is as follows:

1. To create a new Aperture Library that is organized in a Year (Blue Folder) > Month (Project) structure.
2. To create the same folder > sub-folder hierarchy on the hard drive.

Step 01 – Launch Aperture and create a new Library

Hold down the option / alt key when you click on the Aperture icon in the Dock. This will allow you to create a new, empty Library.

Step 02 – Click Create Library button

Click the Create Library button and you will be presented with a dialog box.

Step 03 – Create a new, empty Aperture Library

Select a destination folder and enter a meaningful name for your new Library.

Step 04 – Import Folders as Projects

The main purpose of this step is to use Aperture to copy or move your exisiting images from a Year-based folder structure to a folder structure that is organized by Year / Month.

(click to view a larger version in a new browser window)

I'm not able to come up with an easier way to do this short of writing code or Automator actions, so your mileage may vary. One other option is to consider using Phil Harvey's ExifTool to move your images into a Year / Month hierarchy, but I haven't personally tried this application yet.

Additionally, you'll have to bear with the overhead of Aperture generating thumbnails and previews for the imported images. You can reduce the load on the system by switching off preview generation (available in Aperture > Preferences…, or hit command+,) for this initial round of import, but remember to turn it on again after the final import, which we'll go through later.

On to the initial import step. First, ensure that Library is selected, then hit shift+command+i or File > Import Folders as Projects….

Step 05 – Specify options for the Import Folders as Projects dialog

It's important to choose the correct options for this dialog.

(click to view a larger version in a new browser window)

The source folder should be the enclosing, or parent folder of the physical Year folders on your hard drive.

For the destination folder, either select the existing parent folder, or create a new one just to be safe.

Decide whether you want to Move, or Copy, the images from the old structure to the new.

We want aperture to create a Year folder, and a subfolder for each Month within that Year, for all the images that we are performing this operation on, so you should select Image Year/Month for the Subfolder field. Aperture looks at the EXIF data in each image to help with this process of copying / moving the images to the appropriate Month folder.

Hit the Import button, and if all goes well, you will see the Import Complete dialog box.

If you bring up the destination folder in Finder, you should see a Year > Month > Images structure created nicely for you.

In your Aperture Library structure, you will see that your images have been imported into a single Project that is named after your source Parent folder.

(click to view a larger version in a new browser window)

Each Year folder gets imported into Aperture as Albums under the main Project. Here is my beef with Aperture. I wish that it would allow for images to be imported as Year (Blue Folder) > Project (Month) instead. As it stands, all photos are now categorized into one gigantic project, and if you go to the All Projects view, you'll see a single thumbnail – what's the point?

So, we will have to proceed to Step 6 to work around Aperture's "feature".

Step 06 – Manually create a Blue Folder for each year

To create a new Blue Folder, simply hit shift+command+n or select File > New Folder from the menu.

When creating a top-level Blue Folder, it's best to ensure that another Blue Folder isn't currently selected in the Inspector pane, otherwise, your new Blue Folder will be a child of that selected Blue Folder in the hierarchy.

Alternatively, simply make sure that the Library name is selected prior to creating a Blue Year Folder.

You should now have one Blue Folder for every year that you have imported images in.

Step 07- Delete the Project

Yes, delete that big, gigantic project. We want to purge all image data (EXIF, IPTC, thumbnails) from Aperture's Library, while retaining the actual images in their new Year > Month folder structure.

IMPORTANT! You MUST uncheck the "Move referenced file to trash" option in the dialog box that pops up.

When the Project is deleted, you will be left with an empty Aperture Library with just the Year-based Blue Folders that you created earlier.

Step 08 – Drag all the months for a specific Year folder and drop them onto the corresponding Blue Folder

We now begin the final import process.

This is where we create a structure in Aperture that mirrors the new one that we have on the hard drive.

As a refresher, we want Year (Blue Folder) > Month (Project) as the structure in Aperture.

First, turn on the preview generation feature of Aperture (the option that we turned off earlier).

Next, open up Finder, and navigate to the first Year folder, 2003 in this example. Select all the Month folders, and drag them to the 2003 Blue Folder in Aperture. An import process will be triggered as soon as you let go off the mouse button.

If all goes, well, you'll see an Import Complete dialog box and Month Projects below the Blue Year Folder. You can delete the extraneous views that appear below each Month Project. I honestly don't know why Aperture creates those in this context.

Conclusion

Well, we have gone through just one way getting your Aperture Library and folders on the hard drive to follow a Year / Month hierarchy.

Hopefully, you don't have to do this too often as it can be a massive and time-consuming project if you have tens of thousands (or more) of photos.

Good luck!

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To get around the problem, you buy a new external hard drive, and intend to move the original images from being managed within the Aperture Library, and place them on physical folders on your new hard drive.

I will assume that you want to maintain your Aperture Library on your Mac's internal hard drive, and just move the originals to the new external drive.

This is what you will end up with after you've moved the images:

1. The Aperture Library on the internal drive will contain the image thumbnails and previews, together with related metadata such as IPTC, ratings, captions and such.
2. The new hard drive will contain the original photos in a physical folder structure which you will determine.

Let's continue with the steps.

Step 1 – Determine which images you want to move

In Aperture, locate the Project or images you want to move.

You will know whether an image is managed or referenced when you right-click on the image. Managed images will not have the "Show in Finder" option, while referenced images will.

Step 2 – Select the Project or images for moving

There are two ways to making a selection prior to relocating the images to a physical folder.

The easiest way is to simply right-click on the name of a Project, and then select "Relocate Masters for Project …". This relocates all the images within that Project.

You will have repeat this, and the following steps, for each Project.

If you want to export only some images within a Project, or multiple (or all) images from different Projects, you will have to select the images from the browser, and then navigate to File > Relocate Masters … on the menu. Unfortunately, the right-click approach will not work in this context.

Step 3 – Prepare the destination folder and specify Subfolder Format and Name Format

The next step is to specify the destination folder on the external drive.

My current organization structure in Aperture is Year (Blue folder) > Month (Blue Folder) > Event (Project). My physical folder will mirror this structure. For this example though, I will only have Year > Event.

So, I will first create a folder for the year in Finder, say 2002.

I will then let Aperture create a folder for the Project whose images are being moved and have it automatically assign the name of the Project to that folder. I leave the image filename alone. Here's what I enter:

1. Subfolder Format: Project Name
2. Name Format: Master Filename

You'll need to assign the appropriate values to those fields to suit your requirements.

(click to view a larger version in a new browser window)

When everything's ready, click the Relocate Masters button.

Step 5 – Verify that images have been successfully moved

Do a quick check using the Finder that all the files have been properly relocated on the new disk according to the structure you want.

You can cross-check the count of files in the Finder and compare that with the count in Aperture's browser.

Step 6 – See what images are Managed vs Referenced

Occasionally, you might want to know which images in the Aperture Library are Managed, and which are Referenced. The Query HUD tool can help you with this task.

For this example, I'll be using the Query HUD on the browser pane, so I'll make sure there are no conflicting search criteria in the Query HUD next to the Library name in the Inspector.

First, call up the Query HUD in the browser pane by navigating to Edit > Find on the menu, or press command+f, or click on the Query HUD button.

Then click on the Add Filter pop-up menu to select File Status as an additional search criteria.

(click to view a larger version in a new browser window)

In the File status field, select Managed. This will reveal all the images whose masters are managed in the Aperture Library.

(click to view a larger version in a new browser window)

To view photos whose original files are referenced and reside outside of the Aperture Library, select Referenced in the File status.

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