I have found your Aperture articles to be very useful, thanks for taking the time to post them. Quick question for you about your advanced importing article. When you did the following: 'In this case I have elected to copy the master files into a folder called Dogs' Is there any way to tell Aperture to ignore duplicate images and only import/copy the new ones to the 'Dogs' folder? This was a handy feature that Canon's CameraWindow provided and I got into the habit of using it (I don't always delete all the images from my photo card after an import).

Aperture does not ignore duplicates when they are imported, as you and many others have discovered. Certainly this is a feature of iView and many other image cataloging applications. Why not Aperture as well?

It's simply that Aperture is not an image cataloging application: it's an image library application. It includes cataloging features, (including a catalog) as all libraries do, but there is more to it that that. The difference is that a catalog tells you where something is while a library stores it for you as well. It gets confusing when referenced image masters are involved. The addition of referenced masters makes Aperture look just like a cataloging application in some ways. But really referenced masters are a part of the library just as much as managed masters are. It is only their storage that is different.

Having said that, I do agree that having an "ignore already imported images" button on the import pane would be very useful. I just don't see how it could be reliably implemented. How does Aperture know that the image has already been imported? If it gets it wrong, you will lose images and be much madder than a few duplicates could ever make you.