Help fixing a manually messed up database

Question

Hi All,
I am pretty sure I have at least /dis-organized/ my Aperture database in an effort to get a presentation together on a deadline while still being new to the software. I did this by moving images from the nicely organized Projects' names that they were in to /new/ Projects names that I had thought were just temporary. This means that in the middle of putting together the presentation the referenced images disappeared from Albums I created (not fun) but I seem to have recovered from this.
That said, at a minimum I now have images in newer Projects when they resided previously in - basically better named Projects. The images were much better organized the earlier way with the earlier Project naming, basically.
I am planning on getting back in here and spending a day trying to recreate the earlier organization and I am wondering if there is a better way.
For instance, is there a convenient way to bring in Albums from my earlier iPhoto Album or an earlier incarnation of my Aperture database on Time Capsule backup?
Thanks for any help with this.
- Jonathan

Answer 1

Hello again,
  Okay, the fundamentals of organising images in Aperture have been covered in many posts previously and Kirby and others have posted a nice summary, but here are the fundamental principles:
Images live in Projects.  Each image can only live in one Project unless you explicitly copy it.  Dragging an image from one project to another moves the image to the destination Project.
Albums are collections of pointers to an image in a Project.  Dragging images from one album to another DUPLICATES the pointer.  Deleting an image from an album deletes the pointer - the original is still alive and well in its Project.
Keywords, ratings, flags, colours, albums and Projects are all tools to help you organise and use your images in any way you choose - but you have to start with the fundamental principles.  Because you can search on keywords, ratings, flags, and colours, proper planning and use (especially keywords) produces good results in searches.
Let's suppose I was going to collect some images for export to a presentation, and they're spread across a dozen projects.  Here's one way to do it of there weren't too many images (say a few hundred):
I'd command-click on all the projects that the images are in:  this will show all the images in all the projects selected at once in the image browser.
I'd flag all the images I want to use, then create a Smart Album to show flagged images only.
Going to the Smart Album, I play with the order, maybe using colours to set images by section of the presentation
I command-click the images comprising part 1 of my presentation and right-click on one of those images to select Export|Versions form the menu that appears
I select the export resolution and format, and set a custom name convention to prefix the export names with "Part1-{filename}"
Repeat for other parts
If I didn't ever want to use that set again, I'd remove the flags and colours and revert the images to their baseline state.
If I wanted to keep track of which images I was using in which presentation and in effect have an audit trail, I would use keywords instead of the above approach.  My keyword hierarchy would in part have something like the following:
Events
     Vacation
     Celebrations
     Disasters
     Family
     Work
          Client Presentations
               Client X
                    21 June Sales Brief
                         Part 1
                         Part 2
                         etc...
This is how I do it in my structure, anyway.  As with anything Aperture, you can do it in any number of ways..
If it helps, here's my structure as a screenshot, and I almost never use albums:
Regards,
Calx
PS - Sorry, forgot to mention that I don't use iPhoto at all, so can't really help you there.