Creating a Smart Album

Earlier in this lesson you manually added images to a standard album that you exported via email. To make changes to a standard album, you have to manually add or delete images. Next, you filtered the Travel folder temporarily to view only five-star images.

Smart Albums, like filtered Browsers, are updated dynamically according to metadata criteria that you define. When you change the criteria associated with a particular Smart Album, the contents of the Smart Album change automatically. We will create a Smart Album now that contains all of the five-star images that we want to send to the retailer.

Tip

Aperture comes with a selection of Smart Albums already set up in the Library. For example, there are Smart Albums that gather all the images taken in the previous week, and all the images taken in the previous month. Click the Library disclosure triangle to see the preset Smart Albums that Aperture has created for you. Select any Smart Album to see its contents in the Browser.

1.	Make sure the Travel folder is selected in the Projects panel and then choose File > New Smart > Album (Command-Shift-L) or click the New Smart Album button on the toolbar. A new, untitled Smart Album appears along with a Query HUD (located next to the magnifying-glass icon) for setting the criteria for this Smart Album.
2.	Rename the untitled Smart Album Five Star Locations and then press Return. The Query HUD, as mentioned earlier, lets you specify your search criteria.
3.	Make sure the Rating box is checked and that the Rating pop-up menu is set to "is greater than or equal to." Then drag the Rating slider all the way to the right to specify five-star images.
4.	Click the circled X in the upper left corner of the Query HUD to close it. The images matching the search criteria appear in the Browser. You can work with these images in the same way as you can work with the images in any project or standard album. If you change the search criteria, Aperture will update the Smart Album so that it comprises all the images in the Travel folder that meet the new criteria.

In this lesson, you've learned how to organize images in folders and albums (both standard and Smart), how to navigate through and select images in the Viewer and Browser, and how to rate images as five-star selects.

In the next lesson, we'll edit some of the images in the Smart Album to clean up a few glaring problems before we post them as a web journal for the retailer to evaluate.