Filtering on used/unused photos within projects (un-/used e.g. in books, -)

Question

Hello,
I'm trying to clean up my library by removing (archiving) all those unused photos.
This means: all photos from a project should be removed which are not used in any album, book, web-gallery, etc. (or better: moved to a different backup project, which is later exported and burned to DVD)
I can't find a way to do this? How can I find out, whether a picture is used somewhere, or not?
How can I filter on those, to remove unused pictures from a project?
Best regards,
Bernhard

Answer 1

If you know the structure of the Aperture database you could get to an answer pretty quickly, If you would like to know a fairly simple way that will work for just about anyone that uses Aperture and is non technical here is a suggestion:
If all of the albums, books, web pages etc that you care about are contained inside the same project that the masters/versions of the images that you wish to isolate then here is what I would suggest something like the following.
1) Inside a given project create a yellow folder called "used" or something.
2) move all of the albums, books, etc into this folder. (even subfolders if you wish)
3) click on the yellow folder, the browser will now show all of the versions contained in all of the objects
4) select all of the images in the folder and add a special keyword like "USED" or "XXXYYYZZZ" , something that you never use for anything else.
5) click back on the yellow project box and open the browser search hud and search for all images that do NOT have the keyword you just added.
This should take about 5 seconds to do and should work very well for relatively simple library structures. If you have a more complex set up you should be able to adapt something like this to your needs.
RB
Ps. Here is a PDF that describes some in's and out's of Apertures organizational features like folders, etc if you are interested:
http://www.rwboyer.com/RBDesign/Blog/Entries/2008/7/15_Apple_Aperture_2.1Organization.html