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I'm a big fan of Aperture's Vault feature, with Vault-enabled FireWire drives at work and home to make sure my photo library is always backed up. These Vaults give me a decent amount of confidence about the preservation of my images, but I have to admit, no total assurance. The problem is, I have an inherent distrust of hard drives--enough of them have failed over the years to remind me that weird things can happen, even with redundancy.
I decided that I needed one more layer of protection, just in case. The thought of burning my best images (four and five stars) to DVDs, then storing them in a secure location was appealing. Granted, optical discs have their own issues, but combined with my existing FireWire Vaults, the total approach felt solid.
Here's the rub: I didn't want this workflow to be a big hassle. I knew that I wouldn't stick with it if the steps were too cumbersome. So I designed an Automator workflow that took advantage of Smart Folders, and came up with the system I'm going to show you now.
At the heart of this workflow is my being disciplined about rating images. Every shoot that comes into Aperture needs to be rated as soon as possible. By doing so, I've taken the first step toward my DVD archive workflow.
Next, I set up two Smart Folders for each project, or for each folder containing multiple projects. Top-level folders are an ingenious Aperture feature. When you create a top-level folder, and put a bunch of projects in it, you can use Smart Folders to pull images from within all of the projects contained inside the top level folder. This proved to be very handy for this workflow.
The first Smart Folder is for assembling images that need to be burned to DVD, but haven't yet. I don't want to go hunting through all of my projects to find these highly rated pictures, especially since they will be changing week by week as I add new projects.
The two key fields in the non-archived Smart Folder are Rating and IPTC. Set your folder up like this.
You'll notice that I've set the condition for the keyword DVD to "does not contain". I do this because my Automator workflow adds the keyword DVD when the images are burned to disc. The second Smart Folder that contains the images that have been archived handle the keyword condition in just the opposite way.
Now the DVD keyword condition changes from 'does not contain' to 'contains'.
The next two screenshots show you how this system works. (I've stripped out the other keywords for these images to make things less cluttered.) In the non-archived Smart Folder, you see my four and five star images before I've run the Automator workflow to burn them to DVD. In the following screenshot, you see that those same images have automatically moved to the other Smart Folder labeled Archived Master Picks. Also notice that the keyword "DVD" is displayed for each picture. This was added in the Automator workflow. You might also notice another keyword was added during this process. This one tells me which DVD the image was burned to so I can find it easily in the future. So Aperture not only catalogs my images, it's also cataloging my archived DVDs.
This set of images moved from one Smart Folder to the other after running the Automator backup workflow.
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