One of my favorite features of Aperture is its flexible organizational ability for both images and the byproducts of those images, such as photo books, and web sites. Lightroom simply cannot match these abilities — its literal folder structure and separate collections just can’t take you there.
An Example Project
To make my point more clear, I’ve assembled this mock Aperture library project as an example. All the pieces of the project (images, albums, books, web sites, etc.) are kept within the project; there’s no need to duplicate the folder structure as collections which Lightroom requires. Looking at the simple project to the left, you get the idea.
All the images from the shoot are imported into the library project “The Big Shoot.” Projects are the primary containers in Aperture for images. All images are grouped into projects which are simply abstract file collections. Abstract because, for a given project, the images can be anywhere on the disk — scattered among Finder folders as referenced files or stored by Aperture within its Library file.
Within the project can be any or all of Aperture’s other organizational tools. In this example you’ll see:
- An album named “A Subset:” albums are simply alternate groupings of images that are already in the project. Just drag the images into as many albums as make sense for your project as subdivisions and groupings. Images still live in the project, but can also be held in albums as pointers back to the images in the project. These pointers are tiny uses of disk space — there’s never a need to duplicate a file within Aperture.
- Two smart albums named “Keepers” and “Picks:” smart albums use search criteria to automatically group images and then behave like regular albums. In this example, I’ve set up the “Keepers” smart album to gather all images that I’ve flagged in the project and the “Picks” smart album to gather all the images that are rated four-star or above. There is no limit to the number of smart albums you might use or the complexity of the search criteria for each.
- A photo book named “The Book:” books are a great feature of Aperture that has no match in Lightroom. A book is just a specialized album in that you can drag images from the project, or another album, into it in order to collect the images to be included in the book. Aperture’s built-in book formatting tools are quite good and the ability to order the printed book right from within Aperture is wonderful.
- A web site named “Web Sharing:” another type of specialized album is the web page. Like a book, you gather images together and then create web pages containing them that can be exported straight to your MobileMe web site or to a folder to be uploaded to your own web server.
There are other organization tools in Aperture as well: Light Table, Slideshow, and Web Journal. Each is another specialized album with its own features and formatting tools. And then there are folders. Again, these are not literal Finder folders, but are abstract tools that can hold anything. Put them within your project to group together multiple books or put them at the top level of the library hierarchy to group other projects. There are endless examples and uses. Thankfully Aperture 3’s folders are all blue; the blue and yellow folders in Aperture 2 were nothing but confusing.
To dig deeper into Aperture’s organizational tools check out Robert Boyer’s excellent ebook The Definitive Guide To Organizing Your Image Library Using Aperture.
I’m a photographer and a Macintosh user who shoots what catches my eye and tries to remember David duChemin’s credo: “Gear is Good. Vision is Better.” I also dabble in HTML, CSS and WordPress coding. [
What you say about Lightroom and “its literal folder structure and separate collections.” is very misleading, Bob. Lightroom offers BOTH direct control of your physical folders and a collection/project structure, while Aperture forces you to adopt project organisation and makes you jump through a hoop to control physical locations. Also, if you want you can create web, print and slideshow collections (done directly in those workspaces) and they have their own distinctive icons. However, that’s a little-used feature partly because LR collections are multi-functional, unlike those in Aperture. So a LR collection quietly saves its own print, web and slideshow settings as soon as you output it in one of those ways — it’s implicit, rather than forcing you to create a web album.
Again I think you are misrepresenting things, Bob. I know perfectly well what referenced masters are — the argument about the vault atrocity dates from Ap1 — but controlling physical locations of files is a real palaver in Aperture. How quickly can you tell where your pictures are? Instantly as in LR? No. How quickly can you tell if all files in a folder are in the library? Is that really as elegant as LR? Whether you import managed or referenced, moving files around your system (insofar as that’s a good thing) means going into the dreadful relocate masters dialog. That’s quite a hoop compared to LR’s dragging between folders. Likewise, import folders as projects is a horrid kludge — as soon as you move images between projects and that matching between physical location and Aperture projects is gone.
Where you would have a stronger point is that LR, by providing both folders and virtual organisation, encourages some people to start using their physical folders for far more than just ensuring the physical safeguarding and completeness of their files, rather than using metadata and creating collections.
Gio,
Lightroom does have a literal folder structure for files (called Folders in the interface) and a separate system of collections (called Collections) for pointers to those files. A Lightroom collection is very much like an Aperture album, just in a different part of the interface. Aperture doesn’t force you into a project structure any more than Lightroom forces you into a folder structure — both are just the fundamental nature of how the applications look at file management.
Aperture can handle physical file locations in exactly the same way that Lightroom does, if the user wants to, that’s called “referenced masters.” Those masters can be in any Finder folder structure that is desired — its not a hoop to jump through, its a standard Aperture feature. Your project structure can, if you wish, directly reflect your Finder structure. You can even have some files as referenced masters and others as “managed masters.”
Lightroom collections are clever, just as you say, in that they will save print, web and slideshow settings. But if you want to have more than one such setting, you’d have to create another collection. Aperture is just a little more obvious about what’s happening.
The good news is that both programs are tremendously powerful and flexible. At least on the Mac OS X platform, there’s a choice of both!
Yes, I see it as pretty fundamental to what a program with DAM aspirations requires. Aperture copied Extensis Portfolio’s approach of hiding the file locations, and in theory it’s great if your computer can do it for you, but in the long run stuff always happens.
Gio,
All true (other than the misrepresentation). But some may argue whether the vault is an “atrocity” — its certainly an option with no need to use it if it doesn’t fit your workflow.
Some folks are very concerned about where, exactly, on their disk(s) their files are located. Lightroom does a great job at that. Others don’t really care where the files are, just that they can get to them when they want.
Its a difference in original design (Aperture didn’t add referenced masters until version 1.5). There are good and bad points for each approach; I guess I fall on the side of letting the computer keep track of where things are and you would rather have a stronger hand in that. Its all good.