(If you’re just joining us, start with Tip 1)

Tip 8 — Update Your Places

I’m a huge fan of Aperture’s Places feature, and even dedicated a recent Live Training session exclusively to it (check out Session 017). The reason I think it’s so awesome is that when looking back at years and years of photos, it can be exceptionally cool to look at a map and see all the places you’ve been, and instantly dive in to see the photos there. Even if you don’t get any more specific than dropping all 2,000 photos from your vacation to Paris onto “Paris, France” on the map, you can still take full advantage of this feature. Not only does it make it easy to find photos from that place we went to, you can also instantly see all the accumulated photos over years of visits. For example if you visit grandma in St. Louis with the kids every summer, you could immediately view every photo taken on every trip there by simply zooming in on the map.

Viewing all your photos on a map is very, very cool (click to view larger)

In the Live Training I got into specifics on how to assign individual or groups of photos, by a variety of methods including drag-and-drop on the map, searching for location names, and even integrating dedicated GPS receivers or GPS logging apps into your workflow. But there is one super-easy way to do this that I neglected to mention in the training, and that’s using Aperture’s Project Info pane.

When you’re in Projects view, as you roll over a Project, you’ll see a little info (i) icon show up.

Click the info (i) button to open the Aperture Project Info pane

Click that to open up the Project Info pane.

The Aperture Project Info pane can be a treasure trove of info

Here you can see the title and date and change the thumbnail if you like. You can also enter a description, which is quite cool as text entered there is searchable in the super-fast search window under the Library tab.

To update the location, click the Assign Location… button at the bottom left of the pane.

Clicking on “Assign Location” opens a window to assign a Place in Aperture to the entire Project

That will open Assign Photos to a Place window, which lets you search for a location and assign it to the entire project. Be as generic or as specific as you like. For example, I had some scans of old photos from a trip to Portugal when I was a little kid. I don’t know every place we went, so I just assigned the whole project to “Portugal”. The sample you see here is being assigned to the city of “San Jose, CA”. I have others where I’ve assigned them to the hotel I was in when the photos were made. It’s up to you.

Search for a location in the search window at the top, rename the Place if you like in the Place Name window at the bottom (for example, search for an address, then change the name to “Grandma’s House”), then click the Assign button. That will take you back to the updated Info pane.

With a populated Aperture Project Info pane, you can see when, where and what this Project is all about

As you can see above, I also entered a description to the project. You can change the view of the map from Satellite to Road to Terrain, just like in the full Places view.

What if I already have some locations assigned?

You might have a project with photos that already has some locations in it. Maybe you added some geo-tagged iPhone photos to this project, or perhaps you simply had already pinned a few photos to precise locations on the map — but not all of them. When you go through this process outlined above, Aperture will give you the option to Replace the existing location with the new one, but if you click Don’t Replace, then only the un-placed images will get the new location, and the others photos will be left alone.

When adding Places to photos with existing locations, Aperture doesn’t have to overwrite them

I’m slowly updating my entire, massive Library… and when it’s done, that map you see above will look even better!