Organise photos in Aperture like Lightroom?

PoleStar

Hi all.

I got Aperture for myself as its way cheaper than Lightroom on the Mac and essentially does most of the same.

When I tried Ligthroom however, I used to love the way it just imported all photos and put them into folders based on dates and then if you wished you could select photos for virtual albums.

For anyone who knows Aperture you will know that each time you import its into a project. This is all very well at first but you start to run out of names for your projects. Sometimes I do name a new project e.g. February 2012 for simplicity but I am wondering if anyone knows a way to achieve the same kind of "by date" organization as in Lightroom?

I just can get used to the way Aperture does it. I know you can organize the projects by date etc but it just seems impractical if you library gets to any half decent size.

Ballyman

Name each project as something like
20120301 Nice Flowers in Dublin (the 20120301 being todays date in reverse. You need it in this order to be able to index properly in your operating system)

then rename each file sequentially on import to this project from:
120301_0001.jpg

This way every single file you import is simple to find in future and all have unique names. If you have two projects on the day then use

20120301 Nice Flowers in Dublin
20120301 Naked Ladies in Biarritz

This time you rename each file sequentially on import to Nice Flowers from:
120301_0001.jpg
If you have 80 pics in that folder then you rename each file sequentially on import to Naked Ladies from:
120301_0081.jpg

It sounds complicated but it's simple to do and you then have a functioning file system where every filename is unique and easily indexed.

Gregor Samsa

I'm not in front of my Mac now, but there is a way of getting Aperture to split all your imports by date into new projects. So if you have 200 images on your card, taken over 3 days, when you import, Aperture will create 3 projects (each one can be automatically named after the date in question), with the correct photos in each one.

In the Import pane, you need to check "Automatically Split Projects" (see screenshot below)



Then there's some preferences you can set up to define how the splits happen. So you can set it up to split daily. More info here:

http://aperture.maccreate.com/2010/02/14/autosplit-projects-on-import-in-aperture-3/

Kenny Logins

Have you tried http://www.darktable.org/ ?