Aperture & Raw: Referenced or Managed Libraries? Workflow?

[cayenne]

Hello all,

I've just downloaded the new version of Aperature, and I'm going to start using it with RAW from my new Canon 5D3.

I'm just wondering if any other Aperture users out there could chime in to how they download and work and organize within Aperature.

Do you set up your own folder structure, and use the referenced method....I'd read some articles that recommended that when working primarily or exclusively with RAW.

Either way...how do you organize your photos? I'm a little confused how best to set up projects, and albums, etc...underneath the projects.  How do you set up your 'levels' ?  By date? By category and date under that?

I understand how to rate things, keywords...etc...but just trying to figure out how best to set up the storage structure....in case you want to maybe occasionally use another program, like DPP or even Lightroom....

I figured it would be best to come up with a good scheme at the start, rather than have to try to chuck it all and re-organize after I have a lot of photos....

Thank you in advance!

Cayenne

[K3nt]

I have done what you said you wanted to avoid. I never imagined I'd be taking as many pictures as I have.
Now I organize by project name and date. Then I create a sub-album for the project where the best shots go and do my post-proc on them.

For example I have an event I visited on May 25th, let's say a dogshow my project would be named: Tampere International DogShow 25.05.2012.

It works for me but your mileage may vary. 

[bchernicoff]

I've gone back and forth on this myself. I let Aperture store everything and you can setup Photoshop as an external editor, which allows you to right-click on a picture and choose "Edit with Photoshop". On the occasions that I want to edit in DPP, I export the master (now called original in this week's update), edit and re-import.

I'm not sure it's the best way and to be honest I feel like it might be the time for me to experiment with externally referenced masters again.

[cayenne]

I fired up Aperture last night.

I have gone with external Referenced Libraries....

But I'm still trying to come to grips with how best to organize with Projects, Folders and Albums.

I see everything comes in with a Project, I can get a grip on that.

But I've seen people doing either albums or folders with topics like Family which has maybe albums or such sub-dividing family members)...but I'm still trying to figure it all out.

And also, with all this...how to best back it all up. Right now, I have one 1TB SATA disk that I have hooked to the mac with a drive holder...that is doing Time Machine backups.

I have another 1TB drive, I think I'm going to just format, and do straight drag and drop copies of my 'masters' that are being externally referenced by Aperture.

Eventually, I'm going to set up a freeNAS backup system for the whole house....RAID, etc.

One thing I ran into with problems. I declined to share the library from Aperture with iPhoto...but trying now, to get the old photos from iPhoto into Aperture...was a pain. I have basically opened the iPhoto library (import just didn't work for some reason)...and copied all photos and movies from that to a 2nd directory where I store my Canon masters, and then imported those into Aperture.
I have dupes on my drive now of all that..and have been redoing all the meta data on those...but I guess that will work to have my legacy work there (mostly phone photos and movies), and just move forward with this new set up.

cayenne

[bchernicoff]

About iPhoto.. this latest version of Aperture released Tuesday I think can open iPhoto libraries directly. No need to import.

About backups, I don't have Aperture in front of me at work, but there is an option somewhere to backup your library. I have it setup to backup across a SMB share to my linux file server.

It's probably worth reading the Aperture help on albums, folders, projects, etc. Smart albums are really cool. For instance I have created on for each lens I have. Now I click on it and see all photos taken with that lens regardless of where they are actually stored.