Building a Useful Photography Workflow (With Aperture)

The photography community has been abuzz with the recent price drop in Apple’s Aperture to $79. I myself have just recently gotten the program after switching from a windows system to a mac early this year. My workflow was a bit messy, but it has really cleaned up thanks to the switch. Figuring out a workflow that works can be quite more difficult that it seems. I hope that by sharing my newly refined workflow, it may be of aid to those looking to start organizing their pictures or refine their existing workflow.

To judge whether a workflow is effective, there must be a goal to compare it to. Namely, what are the problems that a good workflow must solve? There are three that are important to me:

• Organization
• Back up
• Editing

After shooting, the first step is always to get the images onto your computer. Never transfer your images directly from the camera and instead always use a card reader. Transferring images straight from your camera is much slower and leaves your camera exposed to being banged around or other calamities. By using a card reader, your camera can stay safely in its case where it belongs. Also, don’t delete the images immediately after transferring them. You’ll want to keep them until you have at least two copies on different drives.There are several programs that will import your photos for you, Aperture has this feature built right in. However, I find it best to just import them the good old fashioned way by using Finder. The next key step is to name the files so you can find them easily later. I use Adobe bridge to rename the files because I like the ease and full customization of the formula, but there are many other options such as Automator. Now I’ll admit, my naming convention is quite unusual. Most photographers begin the file name with the year the image was taken. The way I organize by folders, I don’t find that as useful to have the year be the first thing in the name. It is important though to include it somewhere in your file name so that you can search for it later, if need be. I usually begin with the shoot name followed by the sequence number and finally with the month and year the image was taken.

You want to keep two versions of your images, the originals and the master files. The originals get filed away to be rarely visited again, but they are important to keep around as a back up or if you accidentally apply permanent adjustments to an image. The master files are the images you will be working with. You”ll make color adjustments, edits, and export to prints.

Open up Aperture and import the files you named. It’s library file will hold all of the master files. It gets pretty big quickly, so I recommend having the library file on an external drive. Make sure the option to transfer files to the library is selected. This way, Aperture will import an exact copy into its library file not just create a reference to the files location. That is good because we are going to move those originals somewhere. When you import, apply any custom metadata fields (such as copyright info) and add geolocations if need be. If your camera camera doesn’t have built in GPS like mine, the option to import locations from iPhone pictures is extremely useful.

After you are done importing into Aperture, move the original files to an external drive and organize by folder. I organize my folders first by category then by year and then by sub categories/shoots. It doesn’t really matter how you organize your files or name them. Just come up with something that works and stick with it. Now you can review, label, edit, etc. in Aperture.

Finally, copy both your master files and your original files to an external hard drive. I would also recommend copying the files to another drive to take for an off site backup. You never know what might happen, fire, theft, etc. After you have safely stored, organized, and backed up your images, you can then delete them off the camera.

An efficient workflow is key to managing an ever-growing photography library. Everyone has a different twist that works for them. The important thing is to find out what works and stick with it. Good luck!