Here are some more Aperture workspace layout screenshots and manipulations. First, start with the Rating layout and open all the stacks:

The pictures are grouped into threes here because I auto-stacked them when I did the import. The triples are the result of experimentation with focus bracketing. Now press Shift Y to select the second group of metadata for the main image and Y to display it:

The metadata appears below the main image. Not readable reduced this far. Command-clicking on another thumbnail selects it in addition to the first image. The display smoothly moves to this:

Now both images are displayed side by side for comparison. Turn off the menu bar and hit Shift Y to rotate the display to get a more efficient use of space and bigger main images:

Select three more images and the display rearranges, still with the metadata displayed for each:


Press Z to zoom and all five images are displayed 100%:


Add another image with Command-click. Press = to increase the rating and all six have one star added (just visible on the left of the metadata):

Deselect four of them and press = again to increase their rating to two stars:

Increase the thumbnail area by dragging the line between the thumbnails and the images above and increase the thumbnail size with the slider bottom right:

Close all the stacks and the top image goes to just one selection:

I have been doing all of this with a specific selection of all the images in the project, those with "IMG" in the name or any fields. This was done in the normal Viewer mode called Multi. There are others that I will explore later.