Kris,

There’s no easy answer to that; you can search by just about any criteria, so essentially the more info you put in, the easier it’ll be to find photos.

For example, if you add location data (either through GPS, or by using Places, or even just entering info in the location IPTC field), between that and the date you can narrow things down considerably. Naming projects intelligently (i.e., name it “Bob’s 10th birthday party, Disneyland California” vs just “Bob’s 10th”) makes it easy to narrow it down very, very quickly.

The more data in, the easier it’ll be, and most of that data can be entered at import in mere seconds.

Kris,

I’m not sure what you mean by my statement that “keywords can absolutely not be used”… I’m not sure of the context of that.

Keywords need to be very specific to be useful. So for example, in the aforementioned example of the Disneyland birthday party, while every single photo could have general keywords like “birthday” and “Disneyland”, if you wanted to be really specific, you’d have to go through each photo one at a time and label them with specifics like individuals names, or current activity, etc.

Location is easy because you can usually do it as a batch. All the photos at the Disneyland party get dragged onto Disneyland on the map, in one move. Done. If your camera has GPS, or merging data with a GPS device, then that’s done for you.

Yes I used to be much more diligent about keywords. I especially used them for people, and to some degree, I still do, but I should do it more. After years of this, these days I mostly just add keywords for family members because it’s quick and easy (enough) and those are the ones I’m likely to search for (i.e. searching for all 5-star photos of my kids together). Anyway I find it tedious, and Aperture’s keyword implementation leaves a lot to be desired. If it gets a major overhaul in a future release, I may reconsider my approach.

Faces sounded great, but the reality of it is it doesn’t work for me. I am waiting for the ability to turn faces on and off on a per-project basis, instead of the whole Library. I really don’t need Faces churning through 800 photos from a concert I shot with 20,000 in attendance. But I do want it scanning my kids’ birthday party.

Anyway, I’ll repeat what I said earlier — the more data you put in, the easier it’ll be to find images later. Even if you combine multiple events in a single project, as long as you name the Albums, the quick Library search will still find them, like this [screenshot]. Notice here Places is searched by this field as well, as evident by the GPS tagged iPhone photos in my “2010-2011 | iPhone” project, which contains photos from Vietnam but I haven’t labeled the Project or Album as such.