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Importing a mess of photos (54GB) help or suggestions #1
John Ranaudo's picture
by John Ranaudo
July 16, 2013 - 11:26pm

So I have a NAS drive with pictures. Most are all organized by year. So 2012, 2011, 2010 are all folder names. Subfolders are sometimes MM-DD-YY or even an actual descriptive name!! Like “Xmas”. Can anyone suggest how they would tackle importing these photos into Aperture?

I can import all the folder at once but as far as I can tell I will have to go through thousands of pictures to separate into projects, folder or albums etc.

THEN there is the whole story on hacking up! Do I keep my library on my local machine or NAS? Do I use the vault feature in Aperture?

Any tips anybody could suggest would be very helpful. I need to get this organized then come up with a backup plan asap.

Walter Rowe's picture
by Walter Rowe
July 17, 2013 - 12:35am

The great thing about an Aperture library is you can delete it and start all over. If you create your new library and import the NAS files as a “Referenced Library”, you can have Aperture treat each top level subdir as its own project.

File > Import > Project as Folder ..

And as I said .. if that doesn’t do what you want, delete the library and start over. You can select just a few top level folders to start with and test.

Scott Davenport's picture
by Scott Davenport
July 17, 2013 - 1:03am

I agree with Walter and start with importing a few of your folders into Aperture and figure out what you want. If you just bring in all your disk folders into Aperture, all you’ve done is “move the mess” :)

I’d also recommend taking a step back and deciding what your goals are for organizing in Aperture. Think about what you want to do with your photos now and in the future, let your answers guide how to structure your folder and project hierarchy. A general guideline is to keep your projects of manageable size … I like to keep mine to a few hundred photos at most. If a project gets larger than that, I look to split it up.

After that, think about workflow, again with relation to your goals. How will you keyword? Do you care about Faces or Places? IMHO, the more diligent and consistent you are applying metadata, the happier you will be later when searching for photos. Food for thought: http://sdaven.blogspot.com/2013/01/my-aperture-workflow-january-2013-update.html

Good luck!

Butch Miller's picture
by Butch Miller
July 17, 2013 - 1:07am

I agree … I would import the images in smaller, more manageable quantities. That way, you can spot problems and make necessary changes without too much duplication of effort.

It may be more work at the onset, but once you have your archive imported, you’ll see how your investment paid off.

Best to do it right … and do it once.

John Ranaudo's picture
by John Ranaudo
July 18, 2013 - 6:16am

Thanks guys! I will give it a go!

Joe's picture
by Joe
July 18, 2013 - 2:55pm

Hi,
My proposal is mainly in line with the upper comments. I would suggest you to go as follow:
- Import a first batch of picture to define what will be your structure in Aperture. There is some really good article on this site on best practices for setup. I would suggest you to review all key aperture features and decide if you want to use them: Keyword, Smart album, Faces, Map, Color label etc etc…
-You need also to understand the difference between managed and referenced library. If your folder are a mess and you have sufficient disk space, I will personally go for manage.

it is critical to decide as right as possible on what you want to use. Else you will have to go through the full library again later :)

- then start the maverick job… importing progressively all pics to the new structure…

Good luck!

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