How do I regain control of large collection from several sources

Question

OK, I admit that I am very particular about orgnisation.
Have read loads and watched many 'how tos' for Aperture, I really struggle with iPhoto because I really don't think in dates only.  I also have a collection of photos sent by friends, tucked in weird places on my old computer that I have been popping into a folder on my mac called collected photos. Altogether we're talking about 1300 photos.
As an ex-librarian I want to find a way to get a great library structure in Aperture that will not drive me crazy like iPhoto has.
I fear that this will be difficult in Aperture, because the meta data seem to be totally separate from the projects/file/album structure.
What I would wish to do is to create a tree structure with folders/sub-folders and sub-sub folders. IE Landscape>rural>water>sea
Can this be done?
If so, could you please explain how I can do it.  Many thanks for your time.
All the best,
Derby

Answer 1

Welcome to "Digital Asset Management".  :-)
I don't have a similar iPhoto>Aperture library here now for reference, but I'll try to explain what you've got and what you might do with it.
First, I think your import process brought each iPhoto Event over as a Project. Maybe with the same names as the iPhoto Events. Image 'files' can only be in one Project. The Aperture model is that you have a Master and one or more Versions. (A Master is actually the first Version of an image, too.) If you drag a Master or any of its Versions from one Project to another, they all move.
Remember that Aperture keeps one Master file and a Version is a set of 'instructions' or Adjustments to the Master, it is not a separate file. Versions of a Master remain in the same Project.
Since iPhoto had Original and Modified images and they were two separate files, when you imported your iPhoto Library, it brought over both image-files and they are each now a Master and they should have Keywords like iPhoto Original and iPhoto Edited. (Look in the Metadata tab). Offhand I've forgotten whether the conversion to Aperture also put the pairs of images in Stacks, but that's a topic for another discussion.
Aperture doesn't have "Events", so I'm not sure what you meant when you asked about finding images in both Projects and Events.
You can rename Projects by just clicking twice on their title and typing in a new one.
You can put images (Versions) into Albums. They are still in only one Project but can exist in more than one Album. Albums can't contain Projects, just Versions of images. If you right-click on a Version, you can pick "Show in Project" if you want to see where the original is. To remove a Version from an Albums, you can either "Remove from Album" or "Delete Version". The first doesn't actually delete any images, the latter puts the image into the Trash. (Note that trashing a Version doesn't delete the Master until it's the last instance.)
You can organize Projects and Albums into Folders, independent of where the Project is, meaning that you can organize your Projects by each year or by a particular vacation trip (e.g. Europe at the top level and then Countries underneath). Then, perhaps, you can have Albums of photos of cathedrals, boats, food, ad infinitum.
Keywords, Faces, and Places are orthogonal to all of the above, and you can still pull out all the photos of any of those (like you might have in iPhoto) by searching or smart folders.
Chapter 3 of the Aperture manual can answer most any question regarding the above discussion. I guess I should also caution you to _not_ empty the Trash in Aperture until you've got a good handle on Chapter 3.