Move to Aperture with Photoshop edited images?

Question

There was just a new thread which asked about iPhoto edited images being moved to Aperture. Didn't want to be accused of hijacking a thread by asking an elaboration in that thread, so here's a new one.
A further question that thread brings up:
I too have edited images. (Very few are in iPhoto).
I do have way too many edited images that have little clones, in various states of edit & possibly recropped in Photoshop, as well. Saved as various resolutions of *.png or *.jpg or *.psd. It appears daunting to move all those in a coherent way.
Is there a way to handle a move to Aperture that reduces the pain of such a messy state?

Answer 1

In Aperture you have two different flavors of organizing structures:
Containers (projects and folders): In the projects you store your images, and the folders help to group them hierarchically for easy access, see Kirby Krieger's essay: Re: Organizing in Aperture, concise long version:
Output structures: Album, smart albums, slide shows, books, webpages, ...: The output structure does not actually store the images, but references them for specific uses and describes relations between images, bases on properties of the images, like keywords, captions, and other tags.
What you need to do, when designing your own library structure, is to clearly seperate the aspects - storage and use:
The storage structure should be simple, but consistant - I am a follower of Kirby's maxime: "one shoot - one project" - just like in the old times of rolls of film - one box per film roll. As to the allocation of folders to contain your projects, there are different approaches; you may go for a chronological scheme How do you structure you library? or group by categories, anything is fine, as long as it isn't to involved, straight forward, and easy to maintain.
The output structure should be flexible; you will find that you will frequently adapt it to the project at hand. Since the ouput structure heavily relies on the tags and keywords, you should invest some effort into define import presets, to get most of your tagging done automatically on import.
Thus said, back to the problem at hand:
Looking: If I use "Stacks," I can group/clump them together. That's a pretty good use for stacks, especially if judiciously assembled into a project container.
I recommend against using stacks for long-term structuring. Stacks are somewhat weird, transient creatures between storage and output structures: they don't fit completely into one of the above categories. They are used by Aperture as storage stucture on import, but their use is restricted - you cannot move single  images contained in a stack to another project (all images in the stack will move together), and special rules apply if you use stacked images in books and slide shows. Also you will need stacks for other uses, and you will want to be able to stack your images according to other criteria. It easy to unstack all images by mistake - happens to me all the time - then your storage structure will be broken.
I suggest to group related images by filename on import - using a custom import preset for filenames. That way your structure will be persistent not as fragile as when based on stacks.
Regards
Léonie