First off I want to thank you for your website it has been very very helpful to me, since I am a beginner to using Aperture and I was getting fed up with the master files and organizing, but know I understand all of that completely. My only question is that in your screenshots for your library section for Aperture, next to all of your projects it shows how many pictures are in every one. I was wondering how did you do that?

Turn on the display of the number of versions in the Aperture preferences:

When you have it turned on, the library shows the number of versions in each project like this:

That version count includes all versions, including those in stacks. So you may have 100 versions in a project, but only 5 images that are really different, the other 95 being the non-pick stack items.

Tags: Q&A, Aperture, Projects, Versions

Congrats on your blog! There definitely is a lack of consciousness on Apple's side with regard to the ease of use of manuals which should - in our opinion - reflect the ease of use of their hard- and software (which is not the case). Thanks for every effort to change that! I spent a lot of time trying to understand the project/album/folder business. It may become a little easier with your help. The next thing (which I suppose is linked with the above subject) I will have to get my teeth in is "How do I delete a version and keep the master"? Until now I have not found a way to delete just this one file and be sure I have not done harm to something else.

A warning dialog is always presented when a master is about to be deleted. When no masters will be deleted, the delete proceeds without the warning and the operation can be undone with command Z.

When you select an image and delete it with Delete Version, that version will always be deleted. The master is only deleted if the last version is deleted, so if you see the dialog, that's the last version. File > Delete Master Image and All Versions always trashes the master and all the versions, and gives the same warning dialog.

Some confusion arises with images in albums. Remember that albums are just a different way of looking at the same images that are in projects. They are not themselves separate versions. Any change to an image in an album (including deleting) will affect the image in the project and all other representations of that image in other albums in exactly the same way. On the other hand, removing an image from an album will make it disappear without deleting it.

Note that the images you see are always versions, since you cannot see or manipulate the master directly. Each time a photo is added to Aperture, it stores the master and creates a version from it that contains no adjustments or modifications. There is nothing special about that particular version. The consequence of this is that if new versions are created either by duplicating existing versions or directly from the master, then none of them is the "master" version. You can delete versions in any order and only when the last version is deleted will the master be deleted.

Tags: Aperture, Deleting, Versions, Masters, Library, Q&A

I'm very new to Aperture, and am still struggling with stacks, though. My problem is that I'd like to put multiple versions of a single photo in a stack, cropped for different print sizes (with keywords of "5x7", "8x10", &c). But I also want to use stacks for selecting the best shot of several similar ones. My problem comes when I want to do both: Stack several shots together, but have multiple versions of the "pick." How do you do this without getting very confused?

[Update: A reader pointed out to me that filters on regular albums do include stacks that have members matching the filter. This behavior is not the same as projects (no match) or smart albums (match and extract images). I have amended the article to include this].

It is not obvious, but Aperture already does this for you: if you put images in a stack and then create versions, those versions are grouped with the originals. But there is a twist: if you leave the variations in the stack then a regular project filter cannot find them. The only way to find them is with an album: a smart album will find and extract the images; a regular album will find the images in the stack, but not extract them.

Look at this rather contrived example. Here are four images in a stack, with the pick on the left:

I want to manage two different crops of each of these. I'll make the crops really obvious so they can be distinguished in this example: one set of crops will be vertical and the other set horizontal. In real life they would have more realistic aspect ratios. I will start with the pick. I duplicate the version and drag it out of the stack (option drag does that in one step):

Then I crop it and keyword it:

Then duplicate the same original with option drag and crop it again, this time vertically, and keyword it:

Now I repeat that for the other images in the stack, just leaving them loose in the project:

A big mess. But that is OK because they are tagged and have the same file name as the originals. I can still find anything I need.

To find all the cropped images based on, say, the third image in the stack I have to do some filtering. Selecting that image and bringing up the inspector with control D lets me look at the file name (add the file name to the display using instructions here if it is not visible):

I copy the file name from the field: "Pine tree chopping22.JPG" and paste it into the project's filter dialog in the Other Metadata section:

And select is as the condition:

Here are the resulting images:

Notice that the original does not show up. That's because it is inside a stack in a project -- and only albums can see inside stacks. That is why I left the cropped versions loose in the project.

That found all of the crops based on one image, now what about the opposite: all of the images with one crop? To find all the horizontal images I filter on that keyword in the project. Since the cropped versions are loose in the project they are found:

Now let's do an experiment and see what happens if I tidy up the loose images. I select them all and hit command K to create a new stack:

Those grey rectangles inside the new stack have collected together images that are derived from the same original. What happens if I drag all of that stack into the original stack? This:

The originals and their versions are neatly grouped together! This is great, except that filtering the project on Horizontal now gets me this:

Nothing. Since this is a project filter and the pick does not match Horizontal, the whole stack is ignored. So I have to create an album.

A regular album will find any stacks that include the keyword, but will not extract the images. This tells me where to look, but not what to look at. In this case it is not very useful because every stack with a horizontal crop will be included along with all the other crops available in those stacks.

A smart album will match the keyword I specify and will extract the images. To create the smart album I select the project (important because I want the scope of the filter to be limited to that project):

And select the keyword I need, and check the Ignore Stack Groupings checkbox. That is the magic that lets the filter look inside the stacks and extract the images:

And as you can see, the four horizontal images have been displayed. But now I have lost my stacking information: which one was the pick? That is an inconvenient, but not unworkable problem.

So there are some trade-offs in the way that Aperture has implemented filtering and displaying stacks. I would do everything inside the stacks and have no loose images. I say that because the most important selection will be of the image. The crop follows. Once you have found the image in the stack that you want you can click on the crops and look at the metadata to pick the one you need.

Tags: Aperture, Q&A, Stacks, Adjustments, Versions

When you use stacks and also create new versions of images, Aperture does some interesting things. Versions are grouped together inside a stack if you put them there.

To illustrate this I'm starting with a stack of six simple images:

I make a new version from the K and apply some adjustments to get this:

Creating a new version using Duplicate Version (option V) gives me another version right next to it:

I didn't create that stack, but Aperture has done it for me. And this stack is different -- it has a light gray background inside the dark background. It has grouped the two versions for me. I can drag one of the versions out and have them as separate images if I like:

Duplicating versions that are inside a stack makes a version group inside it. Here I have duplicated the T:

And adding versions to a stack that contains the master or other versions of the master automatically creates a version group inside the stack, so putting all the versions next to each other. It's a little like siblings always wanting to sit next to each other when they are with others. Dragging the two Ks I made above into the stack gives me three Ks together:

And this brings up another way to magically make images vanish. Here is an album that contains just the two blue Ks. I created this when they were outside the stack. See there are (2) items in the album:

When I moved the two Ks into the stack and went to look at the album it showed empty -- but the Album still shows a count of (2):

I am not sure if that is a bug or a feature, but it is an easy way to lose images. There is no way to mark an Album to ignore stack groupings, and this is the result. It's not a filtering thing either. Filtering was set to show unrated or better. I also discovered that by using undo and redo you can get the Album to show the stack pick and not the Album pick.

Tags: Aperture, Stacks, Versions