Look at Aperture’s vast collection of adjustment tools and it’s obvious how much more powerful it is than its smaller sibling, iPhoto. When you consider that most tools can be turned into brushes to apply a change to only one part of a photo, the level of sophistication becomes clear.
But these types of apps are designed to do more than merely improve the look of an image: they are also there to help you organize your growing collection of digital shots. In that respect, the clear difference between Aperture and iPhoto is that in the former you can group albums, books, web pages, and so on into projects. Think of projects as a sort of improved and expanded event. By contrast, iPhoto sorts everything out by type, so that all albums are grouped together; so are any books or slideshows you may have created, irrespective of which event you used to create them. If you have a lot of them, it could end up being difficult finding the one you’d like to work on.
Aperture has another trick up its sleeve when it comes to organizing your photos: look at the menu bar and you’ll see Stacks.
Stacking is a way of grouping shots without having to create a separate album in order to keep them apart from other photos. You can turn any highlighted photos into a stack, but that organization will also affect the content of albums within your project. If at least one photo from a stack in your project is present in another album, all the other photos – and the stack that contains them – will then appear in that album. You can collapse the stack to only see the first image (known as your pick) to pare down your images without actually discarding any of them.
We’ll show you how you can make the most of stacks, and look at the available keyboard shortcuts to help you create and manage them: you can reorder photos within stacks, select a new pick, expand and collapse them, split one into multiple stacks, all without ever touching your mouse or trackpad.
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