Smart Album not so smart?

Hi. A few months ago I upgraded from iPhoto to aperture. It's all rather confusing but I've been willing to overlook it because of the usefulness of aperture as an advanced photo editor.
Now however all sorts of weird things are showing up. The Smart albums in particular are bizarre. Even the ones that come pre-made in Aperture. In particular the “in the last month” and "in the last week" etc. contain images from all over the map, as it were. Yes, there are images from in the last month, week or what have you—but there are also random images from all sorts of other time frames, projects, albums and folders.
This is particularly annoying because it also seems to have messed up the way photos are synced with my iPhone which (much to my surprise) is one of my favorite things to do on the iPhone: display my photos. Albums on the iPhone contain images often repeated 75 times or other such bizarre problems.
I assume something is corrupt somewhere but I don't know how to “reboot” my libraries without losing precious information.
Can anyone tell me what is wrong with my smart albums and what is wrong with the syncing.
Many thanks…

As a new Aperture user myself, I had a similar issue. Maybe it's related to yours.
Smart Albums have many options to choose from, and I was a bit confused at the beginning. While setting the Smart Album, you need to be sure you're marking the options you really want/need, and nothing else. For example, my "In the last month" Smart Album showed only one photo, and that wasn't correct.
But the reason was simple: I had written some text in the Search/Filter field (upper right), and obviously that was filtering the not-so-smart results in my folder.
Hope that helps.
JJ

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