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Apple Photo Books #1
Maureen McPherson's picture
by Maureen McPherson
October 18, 2012 - 10:53pm

I am considering making a photo book of my “best” photos of 2012. The problem is that my photos are spread out into three different Aperture libraries. Am I able to start a book in one library and then pull photos from another library? How do I do this if it's possible? If it's not possible, any suggestions on how to get all of these photos into an Apple Photo Book? THANKS!

Thomas Emmerich's picture
by Thomas Emmerich
October 18, 2012 - 11:21pm

Maureen,

Unfortunately you can’t create a book with photos that are in different libraries. You are going to have to migrate all the photos you want in the book into a single library. This is not so hard to do. It just involves doing a bunch of exporting and importing.

The first thing you need to do is choose all the photos you want to use in the book. Do this in each of your libraries by creating a new Album and adding the photos you want in the book to it.

Next decide where you want the book to live. Choose any one of your existing libraries or create a new one just for the book.

For each library, export the album you’ve created as a new library. (File->Export->Album as new library…) Make sure you use a descriptive name for these libraries so you can keep track of them later. If you chose to build the book in one of your existing libraries, you can skip this step for that library.

Next open the library where you want the book to be built. You can use one of your existing libraries or just open one of the exported libraries and import the other exported libraries into it to create a new library with all the photos you need. Choose File->Import->Library… and import the libraries you created above. This will get all your images into a single library so you can build the book.

There are some pitfalls to doing this. One is if you decide later you want additional photos in the book that you didn’t include in the original exports, you’ll have to repeat the export/import process again for those new photos. Another is you’ve duplicated photos in various libraries now which takes up more disk space and can lead to the same photo in various places having different adjustments.

The best way would be to just merge all your libraries into one. It all depends on the original reason why you decided to create those separate libraries.

Thomas

katy's picture
by katy
October 19, 2012 - 4:00am

This may or may not be relevant but I will share a wall I ran into while doing a similar book. Apple will only allow a maximum of 100 pages in a book. 100 pages can go quick, esp if you are trying to cover a full year. Just wanted to save you future aggravation. Hope it works out for you. Katy

Maureen McPherson's picture
by Maureen McPherson
October 20, 2012 - 3:24am

THANKS! I always get my questions answered here!

Walter Rowe's picture
by Walter Rowe
October 20, 2012 - 5:23am

There are alternatives to creating your book in Aperture. You still have to export the images to a format that can be consumed by the book creation tool. I have seen one some books printed via Apple and they were very nice as keep sakes. I would not call them coffee table quality books, but they are very nice. A rock music photographer I know makes an annual book and gets all the artists to sign it every year at the NAMM conference.

Blurb prints great books and has a tool called BookSmart that offers lots of layout features, lots of sizes, and different choices in paper quality. I don’t know if they have the 100-page limit of Aperture.

Photo Book Press and LuLu.com make coffee table quality books, but they are expensive on a per-unit basis.

SnapFish and similar photo processing sites offer online book making and are much less expensive options, but I don’t know about their paper or print quality.

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