Photo Collages in Aperture 3

With young kids at home, I've often taken a rapid sequence of them making silly faces. In Aperture, I can quickly make a collage using the Books feature. For example, the Modern Lines book theme has 4-up and 9-up pages which lend themselves perfectly. Other themes have similar pages.

9-up and 16-up Layouts in Aperture's Modern Lines book theme

With books, creating a collage is easy. Select the pictures you want, create the book, and drag the photos into place. There's no need to fill in an entire book - you're simply using the book theme as a page layout tool. Once you're collage is done, save it as an image back to Aperture using the Print feature. Click Print Book and use "Save PDF to Aperture" in the print dialog. The PDF will be processed and Aperture will prompt you to import it as a new version.

Saving a book page as a PDF for Aperture

Importing a PDF into Aperture

I tend to import the collage image into the same project where the sources came from - that's of course worked for me thus far as all collage images have come from the same project.

Final steps I do include relocating the master image (I use referenced masters) and assigning a "Collage" keyword.

I've already done collages this way several times, so I created my own book theme and made a variety of collage pages. At present, there doesn't seem to be a way to export a book theme (or I'd share the collage pages I've created). Maybe in a future Aperture release.

And I've promised myself at some point I'll do my tribute to the A Hard Day's Night album cover.