Best Structure for Organising Photos - iPhoto wouldn't do it, can Aperture?

Hi,
I was wondering if Aperture would let me organise photos in this way:
I have 'groupings' of files of pictures. For example 20 or so files containing university pictures inside a folder called 'university'. I then have 10 or so files containing pictures of the family inside a folder called 'family'.
What I would like to do is view the top folder (university or family) with a thumbnail, then go into it and view the subsequent folders as thumbnails, and then go into one of those and view all of the pictures as usual.
The problem is, if the 2nd level folders are all projects, I can't view them inside their respective 'top level' folder. Aperture (as iPhoto) appears to only let me view all 'projects' or all 'pictures'.
I tried having albums inside projects in the hope that clicking on the project would show thumbnails for each album but still with no luck.
I've had a look at the Aperture guide but this has proven unfruitful also.
Can anyone tell me if Aperture can do this and maybe if so, how it would do this because I'm at a loss?
Many thanks!!

Short answer is no. Neithr application is a folder-based "nesting" system.
They are databases.
Aperture is superior to iPhoto because you can have folders and within those you can have projects, and within those (or alongside in the folder as well) you can have albums, so it will work for you that far. It sounds like you've taken it that far at least.
The option to view as thumbnails is not available because of the skimming feature. All projects are displayed in such a way that all photos are visible, but the "top" photo is the representative key photo. That's similar to what you want to do, at least from a user interface POV, but it's a default behaviour, so the manner in which you want it to work is not how it can ever work. You cannot "nest" using key photos representing sub-folders.
Databases require you to organize your content along more rigid forms than file/older structures. Databases can handle a far larger volume of data and organize it with speed and efficiency as a result. You'll either have to change your system or use a non-Apple product.
mattnedgus wrote:
Hi,
I was wondering if Aperture would let me organise photos in this way:
I have 'groupings' of files of pictures. For example 20 or so files containing university pictures inside a folder called 'university'. I then have 10 or so files containing pictures of the family inside a folder called 'family'.
What I would like to do is view the top folder (university or family) with a thumbnail, then go into it and view the subsequent folders as thumbnails, and then go into one of those and view all of the pictures as usual.
The problem is, if the 2nd level folders are all projects, I can't view them inside their respective 'top level' folder. Aperture (as iPhoto) appears to only let me view all 'projects' or all 'pictures'.
I tried having albums inside projects in the hope that clicking on the project would show thumbnails for each album but still with no luck.
I've had a look at the Aperture guide but this has proven unfruitful also.
Can anyone tell me if Aperture can do this and maybe if so, how it would do this because I'm at a loss?
Many thanks!!

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Best way to organise photos in iPhoto

Hello All!
I'm starting to scan our family history photos and I'm wondering about the most efficient way to organise them in iPhoto. I'd like to benefit from the experience of others on this Forum.
A typical photo should contain the following information: a date, a place and people’s names (e.g., 1963 Béal Feirste Séamas Eilis) and in many cases more detailed information (exact location, description…) in the Information tab. As I see it, I have basically a choice between two methods:
1. Type in detailed individual titles as outlined above and then create as needed smart folders per year, per person, per location.
2. Select relevant photos and assign keywords and then create smart folders as above.
I'm using Aperçu to scan my photos and it requires me anyway to type in titles. In that case is assigning keywords a waste of time?
I’m interested in using a method that not only makes finding and sorting photos easy but which also would enable me to use the resources of iPhoto to save time typing in details.
I'm looking forward to reading your advice!
And thank you for taking the time to reply!

Welcome to the Apple Discussions. Here's how I manage family photos.
1 - upload from camera or scan into a folder on the Desktop.
2 - name the folder with the date of the photo and a brief description of the shoot: +03/08/08-Temecula Hot Rod Show+.
3 - sequentially rename the photos with the date taken and a brief description: 2008-03-08-TemRodShow-001.jpg, -002.jpg, etc. I use a file renaming application like Name Mangler or Renamer4Mac to do the batch renaming.
4 - import the folder into iPhoto which will create an Event with the title +03:08:08-Temecula Hot Rod Show+.
5 - now I use keywords to identify whose in the photo, where it was taken and any other information. That way I can search for a person and a place or a person and a day.
For scanned photos iPhoto will sort them based on the scanned date. You can use the Photos->Batch Change->Date menu option to set the correct date for those photos.
6 - Albums can be used to group photos for special projects like books, slideshows, etc. Photos in albums are only links back to the original photo in the Events folders and do not take up any hard drive space. Smart Albums can be use to group all photos which contain the criteria set in the Smart Album - like all photos between two dates that have the keyword for a certain person.
5 - You can add virtual folders in the left hand source pane to hold other folder, albums, slideshows, etc. - like a 2009 folder containing albums of family gatherings in that year, birthdays, Thanksgiving, Christmas.
Others here will add other approaches to managing photos. It's been my experience that a little upfront preparation (like the folder and renaming before importing) goes a long way in having a organized library later down the line. Sit down with pencil and paper and layout what you want to have as far as organization. Then you can create a library and add keywords ahead of time for family members (don't forget the pets), places, things (like your hot rod, boat, etc.) so that they can be added easily as you import without having to take the time to create those keywords.
Also I've found that if I put off adding keywords at the time of import or shortly afterward I get waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay behind.

RAW JPEG PROBLEM I'm new to Aperture and neglected to mark RAW JPEG pairs when I imported (from iPhoto). Now I have two images for each photo. Help!! How can I change this?

I’m new to Aperture and neglected to mark RAW+JPEG pairs when I imported (from iPhoto). Now I have two images for each photo. Help!! How can I change this?

How did you import from iPhoto? If you saw the Import panel with raw -jpeg pairs, then you probably did not import your iPhoto library as library, but as files, and then you will see plenty of duplicates - previews, thumbnails, originls, edited versions. If that should be the case, it would be better to delete the import from iPhoto and to import your iPhoto library again, but this time using "File > Import > Library".
Only that would require compatible versions of iPhoto and Aperture. What are your Aperture and iPhoto version numbers?

HT1229 what is the best method for using a iphoto with an external hard drive for greater capacity?

what is the best method for using a iphoto with an external hard drive for greater capacity?

Moving the iPhoto library is safe and simple - quit iPhoto and drag the iPhoto library intact as a single entity to the external drive - depress the option key and launch iPhoto using the "select library" option to point to the new location on the external drive - fully test it and then trash the old library on the internal drive (test one more time prior to emptying the trash)
And be sure that the External drive is formatted Mac OS extended (journaled) (iPhoto does not work with drives with other formats) and that it is always available prior to launching iPhoto
And backup soon and often - having your iPhoto library on an external drive is not a backup and if you are using Time Machine you need to check and be sure that TM is backing up your external drive
LN

Starting with a new iMac, best way to organise photos

My old computer macbook pro, was overflowing with badly filed photos, projects and files. As I start with a clean slate, my new iMac my question is the best way to be keeping things, I use illustrator mostly for complex surface patterns. I have photos galore in i-photo, some even have the same auto file number sequence as I use multiple sd cards. For my photos, should I use bridge, i-cloud, is iPhoto old school now. I am not going to just dump my old stuff over and want to do it properly, I promise not to be unorganised on my new iMac (promise). Also, a brief explanation of when you would use Raw, over Lightroom, over Photoshop or visa versa, or is it just a personal choice. The more I learn about software the more confused I get.
Thanks & much appreciated
Regards Vicky

I do understand the reference to the cloud not being about a specific app. I also understand that you, Vicky, are not quite sure which app to use with your fresh start. I am not sure it is horrible to ask here which app(s), workflow, or organizational system might be best to institute, given access to all the various apps available in CC.
I am not quite sure what you are doing, or what your previous workflow was, in part because of your mention of Adobe Illustrator for complex surface patterns. Were it not for that, between your title, and your reference to photos galore, I might suggest Lightroom. It is indeed in part a database, with an ability to handle, and organise, a very large number of photos. In addition to good developing and batch developing capabilities, as well as an ability to tag, as well as add to and manipulate metadata on both import and export, I find it useful. Were I to begin using Illustrator more, which I actually plan to do, I believe I'd either lean on bridge a bit more, very likely in conjunction with exported LR files, or see if it were in any way possible to set up AI as an external editor in LR, though at this point I've no idea if that is possible, or desired.
As to a specific workflow and system of organization, I feel that is quite subjective. For myself, I find myself creating a Library in LR for each Year, (though I could see a pro event photographer creating one for each event), and then importing my SD cards by copying as DNG, embedding the RAW, and setting up the file name to be the YearxxxxMonthxxDayxx_Hourxx24MinutexxSecondxx, with folders created for each month and day. That way, everything is ordered chronologically, even within the OS folders, and the filenames are consistent and unique. I also add metadata for the creator, etc. I then create Collections for each shoot I'm actually focussing on. From LR I can jump to PS or external third party addons, and return after I am done.
There are specific books and videos out there suggesting efficient ways of organizing and processing large numbers of images, and there is no, one right way. It largely depends on what you are comfortable with, and the way your mind works.
Best of luck to you; I know I'll need a bit, and a bit of self-discipline to buckle down and institute a consistent system myself.

Best solution for shared photo album?

I’ve haven’t dipped much into the Photo ecosystem of iOS (mainly because my original iPad never had a camera, I don’t have an iPhone, and on the laptop my workflow doesn’t rely on iPhoto).    As such, I’m not sure what the best solutions are for the following:
Some elderly family members will soon be getting an iPad. I’d like them to be able to, with mimimal clicks, open an app, open an album, and then see all the new/current photos that have been added to a shared album. Photos would be added to the album mainly by a few other people elsewhere (via email or the web).    Specifically, those people likely would be sending photos from either an iPad or an iPhone.
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If I understand you right then you want all users to have "read" access to all folders/files on your shared disk but "read" and "write" access to their own folders/files.
If this is the setup you are looking for then it is not possible with either an Airport Extreme disk or any of the LaCie Ethernet mini disks (NAS).
Basically what you can do it to have a shared folder where everybody has "read" access and then private folders for each user, where the specific user has "read" and "write" access.
I will suggest that you go to www.lacie.com and download a user manual for one of the NAS drives and you can here at the Apple site download the user guide for the Airport Extreme.
Karsten

I have the latest version of iPhoto and now I don't have the Apple templates for emailing photos. What happened? How can I get them back?

I have the latest version of iPhoto and somehow I have lost the ability to use the Apple iPhoto templates for emailing photos. I select my photos, go to Share, go to email, and the templates used to pop up. Now the photos go directly to email. Does anyone know how I can get the templates back?

I encountered the same issue after an upgrade of iPhoto, and it was resolved by clicking on the "iPhoto" button on the menu on the top left of your screen, then "preferences", and in the very first window (General), select the very last pull-down menu "email photos using".
There, you can select various email providers, aol (if set-up), Microsoft outlook, etc... and of course, iPhoto (which should be the very first choice on the pull-down menu).
Select iPhoto, and you will immediately be able to use the templates and make cool cards when emailing your photos from iPhoto.
I hope this helps if your question has not yet been answered.

Best method for moving photos from iphoto to lightroom 5

HI,
I have decided to take up Lightroom 5, moving from Aperture and Iphoto. Is there a "preferred method" to get my photos into lightroom please?

Tom,
I did not expect someone to give me some assistance that quickly, or at all, I really appreciate the effort you have gone to.
Cheers
John Harcourt-Riig
Brisbane Australia
For those who have fought for it, freedom has a flavour the protected will never know. Just Living the Dream & Having Fun

HT1229 What is the best method for backing up iPhoto photos?

Should I copy the full library to a backup disk? Should I copy individual albums? Should I copy individual jpg photos?
How to restore the saved copy to Iphoto in the event that the original version suffers a hard drive crash.
I am running an older version of iPhoto on a G5 iMac on OSX 10.4.1. The iPhoto version is version 5.

Yes you can just drag the iPhoto librarhy to the external - CCC (and SuperDuper ) is great in that after the first copy it just updates the clone
LN

ITunes will not preserve directly structure for transferred photos

I have a large number of photographs that I have transferred to my IPod 5G. On my computer hard drive, the photos are organized into a folder for each year (i.e. 2004, 2005) and then those folders contain subfolders for each month in that year. When I synced the photos with my IPod, the subdirectories for each of the months did not copy over, so all the photos are in one giant folder for each year. This makes finding photos in the IPod very difficult, as I have to scroll through all the photos taken in 2005 (hundreds) before I can find the ones from this Christmas (the individual files are sorted by date). Any suggestions as to how I could make sure the whole directory structure is transferred to the IPod?

The photo support in the iPod is based stongly on iPhoto. By default, years are natural folders in iPhoto. Although in iPhoto 6, you can also look by month, it doesn't create a virtual photo representing that. However if you create a folder in iPhoto, say Christmas 2005, that does get transferred properly to the iPod & thus gives the functionality you are looking for.
It sounds like you're using the sync folder method, rather than using a host app, like Adobe Elements or Album. In that method here's what the docs say:
You can sync all of the photos in a selected folder, or only photos in specific folders inside the selected folder. Folders inside the selected folder will be displayed as photo albums on the iPod , but subfolders beneath them will not be.
More details here

Best workflow for cleaning up iPhoto library?

Hello,
I was wondering if anyone had suggestions for a workflow to clean up a large iPhoto library. Up until now, I have kept every photo I took. Now I want to go through and trim it down to the best photos. I know iPhoto can "hide" photos, but I want to delete them to reduce space, and make it easier to go through my "faces" and "places" updates. I was thinking of adding a "deleteme" tag to the ones I want to trash, then creating a smart album to collect them. Any other ideas?
Thanks!

Personally I prefer going through and dragging the unwanted photos to the trash doing it in one step rather than making it a two step process
You could do it with key words -- or flagging photos and then creating an event from flagged photos and deleting that event.
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LN

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DVD's give you, at best, a resolution of something like 852x400. Given that 1080i resolution is 1920x1080, you can see that you are loosing a huge amount of detail. It will look OK but not nearly as impressive as it might.
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What is the best option for storing my iphoto library on the cloud?

I was curious as to what people are doing (other than backing up to external HD) for backing up the iphoto library? Anyone using any cloud solution out there for storage? What are some of the best options? I have around 30,000 photos in my iphoto library.

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Best practices for managing Movies (iPhoto, iMovie) to IPhone

I am looking for some basic recommendations best practices on managing the syncing of movies to my iPhone. Most of my movies either come from a digital camcorder into iMovie or from a digital Camera into iPhone.
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3. If I want to get a DVD I own into a format for the iPhone, how might I do that?
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Thanks
mek

1. If you type "iphone" or "ipod" into the help feature in imovie it will tell you how.
"If you want to download and view one of your iMovie projects to your iPod or iPhone, you first need to send it to iTunes. When you send your project to iTunes, iMovie allows you to create one or more movies of different sizes, depending on the size of the original media that’s in your project. The medium-sized movie is best for viewing on your iPod or iPhone."
2. Mine appear under "movies" which is where imovie put them automatically.
3. If you mean movies purchased on DVD, then copying them is illegal and cannot be discussed here.
From the terms of use of this forum:
"Keep within the Law
No material may be submitted that is intended to promote or commit an illegal act.
Do not submit software or descriptions of processes that break or otherwise ‘work around’ digital rights management software or hardware. This includes conversations about ‘ripping’ DVDs or working around FairPlay software used on the iTunes Store."

Best practices for organizing photos in iphoto09?

ok, i just rebuilt my iphoto library. here is what i did to get back to where i am now:
1) took my old iphoto library folder, and searched by files larger than 100k. moved them to a new folder. deleted the old iphoto library from my Pictures folder.
2) renamed the entire contents of this new folder to all uppercase. compressed and backed this folder up to a new safe location.
3) used another program to reset the file date to the date the picture was taken (maybe iphoto does this too, i dont know enough about iphoto yet).
after the above steps, i created a new iphoto library, and imported all of my pictures. i now have one single event titled 'Jan 16, 2001'.
i was previously using iphoto05, and was used to the year/month/day/latest type of organization, but am willing to learn how the new school of thought of how 09 is supposed to work. im not sure how the photos are supposed to be broken out so i can view 'family', 'house', 'vacations', 'trucks', 'kitties', etc etc.
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Events are time based - not subject based - although it is possible with a lot of work to manually do a set of subject based events you are fighting thesystem - albums and folders (which hold albums) are a much easier and better way to do subject based organization - or keywords and smart albums - or a combination of both
It sounds like your other program did not make the correct EXIF entries for dates (if you select a photo and use the show extended info option under the Photos menu to see the EXIF dates but set them all to 1/16/2001
Do you still have the iPhoto 5 library?
LN

Best Structure for Organising Photos - iPhoto wouldn't do it, can Aperture?

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