I quite often do searches for pics by keywords etc.. but when I do find an image through the search I would like then to look at the other images from that project, so how do I find out what the project is and where it is in the Aperture Projects view, I could do with something similar to the 'Show in Finder' feature... am I missing something obvious somewhere?

You are not missing anything obvious. The features for doing this are somewhat limited, but it can be done.

Here is an album that displays some images. I want to find out which project the dog photo comes from:

By selecting the image and bringing up the metadata panel of the information pane I can look at the Master Location:

The Master Location is the name of the project that contains the master, so I can just go look there. If the project is in a blue folder or two, then those folder names will be given in a bread-crumb style list: Outer folder > Inner folder > Project.

A more specific method that will locate the master image more uniquely is to copy the File Name, and do a search on it. Start by creating a filter on the entire library:

And then either paste the file name into the text box:

Or use the + pull-down menu top right to add a new search term (Other Data) and specifically choose the File Name option.

The former can be very slow because it may search all the text in the library in a linear fashion. The latter takes longer to set up, but is more precise, matching only file names, and much faster. In either case, check the Ignore stack groupings box if you want to look inside stacks. More than one image may be found because, depending on how you have your master files named, there may be duplication. In the example I show here, the name that the camera gave me has the date appended, so I will only find a single image.

The same technique can be applied to the caption. I caption everything I keep, layering captions onto many images at a time. To find "similar" images, usually from the same project, I just search using part of the caption.

A fast way of finding images taken with the original (and usually part of the same project) is to note the date it was taken and filter the library on that date:

Using the calendar uses very few clicks and uses indexed information, so can often be the fastest.

None of these methods will show which albums contain a particular image. Nor is is possible to find out how many time and image has been used in albums. The best workaround I can think of is to delve into the library and search for image UUIDs, but this is messy.

Tags: Aperture, Q&A, Filtering, Projects, Metadata