Using Projects, Albums and Folders

As explained in Chapter 2, Aperture subdivides your assets into various different groups. These groups can contain further subgroups, helping you to quickly navigate to the precise photos you need; they also help the software to perform searches on the basis of your specified criteria.

Sometimes this is done automatically, such as when you importa series of folders as a Project; sometimes it is done manually, as when you create a folder yourself and drag images into it. Occasionally it is done passively, such as when you create a Web page, which uses photos from an existing collection to create an entirely new one while you work on a related creative Project.

These groupings are set to cascade, so that each superior group - whether that be a Project, folder. Album or the whole Library, also gives you access to all of the contents of the inferior groups. As such, viewing the contents of a folder will also show you the contents of the Projects that go to make up that folder. If that folder contained four Projects, though, clicking on anyone of them individually would show you only its own specific contents and not those of the other three Projects within the overall folder.

The easiest way to visualize this is as a top-down view of an open box, inside of which there are several smaller boxes. From your aerial vantage point you can see the large box - the folder, in our analogy-and...