Web Journals

Aperture: Use A Web Journal To Hold Project Notes

Missing from Aperture is the ability to attach notes and documents to images, albums, or projects. A partial way around this limitation is to create web journals in Aperture and associate them with the images they relate to.

To add notes to My Macworld 2008 project, I control-click the project and select New > Web Journal:
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That creates an unnamed web journal inside the project which I then rename. A web journal consists of blocks of text and images arranged on individual pages, the idea being that each page is a single entry for a unit of time such as a day. In this case I'm just going to use one page.

I add text to the blank web journal by clicking the +T icon, or by dragging it to where I want a new entry. The green line shows where it will be placed:
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Placeholder text appears and can be replaced with notes by overtyping:
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There is a control at the top right that selects whether the text is used as a subtitle or as body text. I can also replace the site title and other placeholder text.

To add images to the web journal pages, I must first add them to the web journal image browser. I add images by option-clicking on a project or album so that two browsers are displayed together and then drag the images I want over to the web journal browser:
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In this case I am taking images from the MacWorld 2008 project, but they could come from anywhere in my library.

To make things easier, I can lock the viewer to the web journal browser:
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This keeps the web journal displayed all the time even if I select album or project browsers and click on the images they contain.

Once I have some images in the web journal browser, I add them to my notes as illustrations by just dragging them in:
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As well as living inside projects, web journals can also be stored in blue folders or brown folders. Although I can't have web journals inside albums or smart albums, I can name my web journals in such a way that they are easily associated with them.

While this technique does not allow documents to be stored with projects, I can still associate them. Using a copy of TextWrangler, I open a new file browser with option command N. Then I navigate to the document I want, in this case a Garageband file, and control-click:
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By selecting Copy URL I have a URL that starts with file://. I paste that into my web journal. Later when I want to access the document I can copy and paste the URL into Safari. Safari will open the document if it can (for a movie for instance), or if it cannot will reveal it in the Finder. This technique works with folders as well. There is, unfortunately, no way to make the link clickable.
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