Creating a Smart Web Gallery Album


There are few tasks as tedious, or as important, to a photographer than creating a portfolio. However, with Aperture's Smart Web Gallery Albums, you can let Aperture build your portfolio for you.

Smart Web Gallery Albums work just like Smart Albums: any images that match the criteria defined for the Smart Web Gallery Album are automatically placed in the gallery. Smart Web Gallery Albums and Smart Albums can also sit at the Library level, outside any particular project. Because they can reside at the top of the hierarchy, they can pull images from any project, making them ideal for keeping an automatic web gallery of all of your best images.

1.

Click the Library in the Projects panel to select it. We want Library selected to ensure that anything we create appears at the top of the hierarchy.

2.

Choose File > New Smart > Web Gallery. Aperture will create a new Smart Web Gallery Album and highlight it for renaming.

3.

Name the Smart Web Gallery Album 5-Star portfolio.

When you create a Smart Web Gallery Album, the Query HUD will automatically appear next to the web gallery. This is where you'll specify the criteria for including images in the gallery.

4.

Select the Rating checkbox and configure it to select images whose rating is "greater than or equal to" five stars.

5.

Select the "Ignore stack groupings" checkbox at the bottom of the Query HUD. By selecting the checkbox, you tell Aperture that you want to include every five-star image, even those in a stack that are not the primary selections.

6.

Close the Query HUD. The Browser will tell you how many images were placed in the Smart Web Gallery Album, while the Viewer will show you the layout of the gallery.

7.

Click the Theme button above the Viewer to select a new theme for the gallery.

There are a number of prebuilt themes to choose from. Let's leave our Web Gallery Album theme set to Stock.

8.

Click Cancel.

Smart Web Gallery Albums allow for a little bit of customization. You can change the number of columns and rows using the Columns value slider and Rows value slider above the Viewer, for example, and select which metadata you'd like to use for a caption by clicking the Metadata Set button.

You can rearrange the order of the images by simply dragging them to new positions, just as you do in the Browser, and you can edit any text on the page by double-clicking it.

Refining Your Portfolio Criteria

In the last exercise, we built a Smart Web Gallery Album based on rating, and now, anytime you tag an image with five stars, it will automatically be added to your portfolio gallery. If desired, you can also use the Query HUD to specify far more complex criteria for Smart Web Gallery Albums and Smart Albums.

1.

In the Projects panel, click the magnifying glass next to the 5-Star portfolio Smart Web Gallery Album name.

The Query HUD opens, allowing you to change the criteria that define which images go into this gallery.

2.

Select the Calendar checkbox in the Query HUD. Calendars of the last three months appear. Aperture does some of the work for you here, highlighting only dates that have associated images. If no dates are highlighted, then there are no images in your Library that were captured in those months.

3.

Click the arrows at the top of the Calendar area to navigate to a month that has highlighted dates. These are dates for which you currently have images in your Library.

4.

Click a highlighted date to add all of the images from that date to your gallery. If you want to select more dates, Command-click additional highlighted dates.

Note that because the Rating box is still selected, Aperture is only selecting five-star images shot on the dates that you're specifying.

5.

Select the Keywords checkbox. Aperture displays all of the keywords used by the images in your Library. You can select the checkbox next to a keyword to add images tagged with those words to your gallery.

You can freely mix and match all of these criteria to select a specific set of images. For example, if your images are keyworded properly, you could create a portfolio of just your indoor, five-star event shots, or your five-star landscape shots. Aperture also lets you add additional metadata criteria.

6.

Click the plus sign in the upper right corner of the Query HUD to open the Add Filter pop-up menu.

Here you'll find an assortment of other criteria that you can add to your search. With these items, you can easily select images based on their creation date, EXIF and IPTC tags, and other metadata.

Of course, you can also create Smart Web Gallery Albums inside a project to limit your searches to just the images in a particular project.




Apple Pro Training Series(c) Aperture 1.5
Apple Pro Training Series: Aperture 1.5
ISBN: 0321496620
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2007
Pages: 190

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