Automating Smart Albums Creation in Aperture

Most of the photographers I know who use Aperture use Smart Albums in order to quickly and efficiently sort and file their images. I do as well.  As I described in my previous post, my workflow is in fact heavily dependent on Smart Albums.  The issue I ran into is having the create the same smart albums and project structure over and over again each time I started a new project.  I considered several options without success. Mac OSX Automator doesn’t really have any useful Aperture actions you can use for this.  AppleScript allows you to create static albums but not smart ones as it’s missing the object class altogether.  So how is one to deal with this issue?  Well the answer was there all along in Aperture (well sort of).  here is how:

1. Assuming that you already have at least one project created that includes all the needed smart albums with all their conditions and parameters.  If not, create one manually.  It doesn’t really matter whether or not it contains any images.
2. Select the project.
3. From the Aperture menu select File>Copy Project Structure.
4. Rename the new project and add you new images.
5. Done!