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Automated Workflow to Archive Your Best Images to DVD
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The Aperture "Master Burn" Automator Workflow

The Master Burn workflow uses Actions that are available as standard preloaded Actions. You can also learn more about these at the Automator.us site. The actions flow in this order:

1. Ask for Confirmation
2. Get Selected Images
3. Filter for Picks
4. Assign Keywords to Images
5. Export Masters
6. Burn a Disc
7. Move to Trash

You can also download this workflow on our Actions and Workflows page. Once it's assembled, it should look something like this:

The Master Burn Automator workflow.

You'll notice that all I've done here is take Sal's "Burn Masters to Disc" workflow that's available at Automator.us, and added two more actions: "Assign Keywords to Images", and "Move to Trash". This is what I love about working with Automator -- you can take a stock workflow that someone else creates and customize it for your needs in just minutes.

You only have a few more things to do before you run the workflow. First, set up a folder on your Desktop to send the exported master images to, then designate that folder as the Destination in the fifth action, "Export Masters". Once the DVD is burned, they will be discarded by the seventh action, "Move to Trash". Then, add the keywords you want to use to action four. I recommend "DVD" and the name of the disc that you will burn the images to. Next, type in that same disc name into the "Disc Name" field in action six. Finally, get a stack of DVDs ready to burn (or CDs for smaller backups), and you're ready to roll.

To initiate the workflow, open Aperture, go to a non-archived Smart Folder, select all of the images in it, and run the "Master Burn" workflow. Your Mac will proceed through a series of steps that will get those images, assign keywords to them, burn them to disc, then trash the (no longer needed because they have been burned to disc) exported masters.

Return to Aperture

Once you have finished burning your disc(s), return to Aperture and see how your pictures have moved from one Smart Folder to another. Your non-archived Smart Folder will remain empty until you add a four or five star rating to new images.

Since this is a redundancy archiving system, I recommend that you only burn discs when you've accumulated enough images to fill up a DVD (or come close). That way you won't be creating loads of discs with only a handful of images on them.

I would also think about where you store these discs. My preference is to have them in a location other than where my Vault FireWire drives are stored. And since discs don't take up that much room, you can even burn duplicates for additional locations.

I'm sure there's plenty of room for improvement in this workflow, or at least customization for your own needs. If you come up with something interesting, be sure to post a comment. And if you design a really sweet workflow, let us know so we can post it on the site for others to use.

Derrick Story is the author of The Photoshop CS4 Companion for Photographers, The Digital Photography Companion, and Digital Photography Hacks, and coauthor of iPhoto: The Missing Manual, with David Pogue. You can follow him on Twitter or visit www.thedigitalstory.com.

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