If you already have your photos organised into folders and subfolders on your hard drive, you can save yourself a lot of time by importing multiple folders into Aperture at once. Aperture will even preserve the folder hierarchy you’ve created, so that everything stays organised.

1. In the Projects pane, click the Library icon.
2. From the File menu, choose Import > Folders as Projects.
3. An Import dialog appears. Select the folder you want to import into Aperture. You can Command-click to select multiple folders. Each folder you select will become a project in Aperture. If the folders you select contain subfolders of photos, those will be imported too.
4. Use the Store Files pop-up menu to determine where you want Aperture to put your imported photos. Choose “in their current location” if you don’t want Aperture to duplicate your photos. With this option, your image files stay where they are and Aperture simply references them — saving you disk space. If you choose “in the Aperture Library,” your photos will be copied (duplicated) when imported.

Keyboard shortcuts make navigating through your photos faster and easier. Here are five of the simplest and most useful shortcuts. Learning these five one-key shortcuts can save you a lot of time.

V

Cycles through the three main view modes — Browser Only (just thumbnails), Viewer Only (big photo, no thumbnails), and Browser and Viewer (a split view, with thumbnails on the bottom and the Viewer above).

W

Switches to the next pane in the Inspector — Projects, Metadata, or Adjustments. Just press W to get to the pane with the tools you need. The same shortcut works when you’re in Full Screen mode and using the heads-up display.

F

Enters and exits Full Screen mode.

If you’ve added keywords to your images, it can be very handy to have Aperture display those keywords as labels on the bottom of each photo in the Viewer. This way, instead of having to open the Metadata Inspector, you can see at a glance which keywords have been applied to each image.

1. Choose Preferences from the Aperture menu and click the Metadata icon at the top of the window.
2. Click the Viewer checkbox (if it’s not already checked) and click the Set 2 radio button, which activates the “Viewer - Expanded” metadata view. In the Viewer, the metadata overlay appears below each photo.
3. You can also change the setting of the Placement pop-up menu to control how this data is positioned at the bottom of each photo. Choose the placement you prefer.

Whenever you need to quickly get information about a photo in your Aperture library — the camera settings used, the file size, even the caption you’ve added to the photo — there’s a lightning-fast way to view the information, without having to open the Metadata Inspector or turn on metadata overlays. Use Image Tooltips.

1. Use your mouse to point to any image in your library — either a thumbnail in the Browser or a full image in the Viewer.
2. Press the T key to display Image Tooltips. This floating panel, anchored to your mouse pointer, gives you on-the-fly access to the basic information about the photo you’re pointing to, so you can see camera settings, keywords, ratings, and so on. If you point to another image, Image Tooltips will instantly update to reflect the data for the next image. There’s no need to actually select other photos; you can just move the mouse pointer over any number of thumbnails or images in the Viewer, and Image Tooltips will continually update with the data for each photo. When you’re done, press T again to hide Image Tooltips.

Searching for Adjusted Photos

Want to quickly and easily locate all the photos in a project that you’ve spent some time adjusting? Aperture makes it easy, by allowing you to search for photos based on the adjustments that have been applied.

1. Open the project or album you want to search, so that its thumbnails appear in the Browser.
2. Click the Query HUD button (the icon with the magnifying glass) next to the search field on the top right side of the Browser. This opens the Query HUD.
3. Click the Add Filter (+) pop-up menu in the upper right corner of the Query HUD and choose Adjustments. This adds Adjustments as a search parameter in the HUD.
4. Set the Adjustments search parameter pop-up menu to “are applied.”
5. Close the Query HUD by clicking the close button in the upper left corner of the HUD.

If you want to create beautiful, richly toned black and white versions of your photos, you can use the Monochrome Mixer to get exactly the look you want.

1. Select the photo you want to convert and make sure the Adjustments pane is visible. (If it isn’t, choose View > Inspector > Adjustments.)
2. Click the + button near the top of the Adjustments panel and choose Monochrome Mixer from the pop-up menu. This adds the Monochrome Mixer adjustment control near the bottom of the Adjustments pane and applies the default monochrome filter to your image.
3. Try using one of the filters from the Preset pop-up menu on the Monochrome Mixer to quickly refine the black and white conversion. You can apply the Monochrome with Red Filter, for example, to add deep contrast to blue skies.
4. Fine-tune your results even further using the individual Red, Green, and Blue channel sliders to “mix” a custom black and white conversion that produces the effect you’re looking for.

Aperture lets you remove unwanted colour casts from photos with a single click using the White Balance adjustment. This simple adjustment can dramatically improve the look of photos that have been shot under lighting conditions that give them a strong blue or orange tint.

1. Select the photo you want to fix and make sure the Adjustments pane is visible. (If it isn’t, choose View > Inspector > Adjustments.)
2. On the White Balance adjustment brick, click on the eyedropper tool. Your cursor becomes an eyedropper and the Loupe appears, providing a magnified view of the part of the image directly under the cursor.

When creating photo books in Aperture, you can design your own page layouts to make one-of-a-kind custom books. One way to introduce a personal touch to your designs is to add a custom border to any photo box.

1. Open a book layout in an Aperture project. (To make a new book, select some photos in a project, click the New button in the toolbar, and choose Book from the pop-up menu.)
2. Click the Edit Layout button in the book layout toolbar, just above the Pages pane. This allows you to change the actual layout of your book pages — moving, resizing, adding and deleting photo and text boxes on the pages.
3. From the Action pop-up menu just below the Pages pane, choose Show Layout Options. The Size & Position and Photo Border controls appear just above the Pages pane.
4. Select a photo box on one of the book pages. If it doesn’t have a photo in it, drag a photo thumbnail from the Browser into the photo box.

Aperture’s printing tools are simple to use, letting you create high-quality prints on your own printer.

1. In the Browser, select the photos you want to print.
2. Choose Print Image from the File menu to open the Aperture Print dialog.
3. Choose a preset from the preset list on the left. Or just choose Sample Single Image Preset. (To print a contact sheet instead, choose Sample Contact Sheet Preset).
4. In the Printer Selection area of the dialog, choose the printer you want to use from the Printer pop-up menu. Don’t see your printer listed? Then choose Add Printer from the same menu to see a list of available printers, and pick the one you want.
5. After selecting a printer, be sure to properly configure the printer’s software. Click the Print Settings button to access your printer’s specific options and make sure they’re set the way you want. For example, to print borderless images, you may have to turn on a Borderless Printing option in the printer software.