One of the coolest things Daniel showed me when he got his MacBook Pro last year was how to organize photos using Aperture. When I switched to Mac in August, one of the first programs I bought was Aperture, and I immediately imported all of my old digital photos, which date back to 1998 (thanks, hard drives, for never crashing!).

Aperture is much more sophisticated that iPhoto, Picasa, or a simple tree of nested folders, and as such it was easy for me to make a few beginner’s mistakes when importing my photos. First, I turned a lot of folders into projects, without understanding that projects can’t be nested. Then today, when organizing, I moved a lot of photos from separate projects to one project without maintaining their organization. To explain this, I’ll have to introduce some Aperture-specific terminology.

First, there are two kinds of images: masters and versions. Masters are the originals; versions are, well, versions of masters to which you’ve made adjustments. You don’t make adjustments to the master (this is called non-destructive editing), so everything is reversible. A version is a copy of the master to which you can make changes.

Second, there are two kinds of masters: managed images and referenced images. A managed image is stored within the Aperture database; a referenced image is stored as a flat file. You can access referenced images through Finder and other programs; you can only work with managed images through Aperture. However, it’s faster and easier to use managed images, so that’s what I did.

So those are the four terms for the images (masters and versions; managed and referenced masters). Now let’s talk about organization.

As you might expect, Aperture supports several organizational formats, including:

• Projects
• Folders
• Albums
• Smart Albums

Projects are collections of up to 10,000 photos, and are intended to correspond to a photo shoot or commissioned project (e.g. a wedding a photographer has been hired to shoot). For a non-pro like me, it’s not obvious how to best use projects. I’d prefer to have just one, and use albums and folders for organization, but I have more than 10,000 photos, so that won’t work.

A few other constraints:

• Projects can contain folders, albums, photos, and so forth, but they can’t contain other projects - in other words, projects can’t be nested
• I want to move the projects I don’t use very often onto an external hard drive, to free up disk space on my laptop

My first mistake was to create far too many projects, without a clear way of organizing them. My photos had been in nested folders, e.g. /2006/02-10 Road Trip/
This would correspond to a road trip from February 10, 2006.

I converted all of these folders to projects, but this destroyed the nested structure since projects can’t contain other projects, so many are orphaned or have no obvious date.

On top of that, many of the photos have inaccurate date stamps. The EXIF metadata was either altered by Picasa (or some other photo management tool I used at some point) or was initially wrong because the camera date wasn’t set right. Too bad Aperture 1.5 doesn’t allow you to change the date stamp (I hear 2.0 does, but it’s $199 to upgrade/switch).

That’s only considering the photos. I also have tons of graphics I downloaded or created for various websites along the way, which have little to no usable metadata.

So here’s what I’m doing to clean up this 30,000-photo mess:

• Creating a folder for each year, 1998 to 2008
• Creating a single project for each year, and putting it in the year folder
• Moving all of the photos for a given year into the project for that year (note: this is necessary because master photos can’t be stored in just a folder - they have to be in a project)
• Deleting all of the empty projects left after the previous step
• Creating albums to organize photos by event - for example, I can create a “Christmas 2007″ album in my “2007″ folder that contains photos from both the 2007 and 2008 projects, in case I took any photos on the same trip but after Dec 31.

This was easy for the early years, in which I only had a couple dozen or hundred photos. But for the past few years, we’ve taken several thousand photos a year, and there are dozens of projects containing these photos. However, they’re also better organized as you get closer to the present.

Some general reflections on organizing pictures:

• Organizing into folders strictly by date is pretty much useless, since a single trip can be split across multiple folders if it spans the end of one year and the start of the next. We always take tons of pictures over Christmas/New Year’s, so this happens a lot.
• Our trips often have multiple phases, and we don’t want the pictures together. For example, we visited family on the way back from San Francisco. Baby pictures and sightseeing pictures don’t go together.
• I want a big timeline view so I can scroll through all my pictures by date and find the ones I want. I can then create an album of just these pictures - not all the ones taken around the same time - for easy reference later.
• I’d prefer not to have to use projects in Aperture, but it’s a nice way to chunk the photos for backup and archiving purposes. And it’s the price of using a professional tool for non-pro purposes.

I think I’ll avoid creating excess projects from now on, and just use one per year (unless I get over 10,000 pictures in one year). Albums and smart albums can do the rest.

Smart albums are cool because they allow you to search based on metadata, and they’re updated any time new photos match the criteria set for that smart album.

I may edit the above as I get more clarity on what I’m doing. Feel free to chime in if you have thoughts on organizing your growing collection of photos.