The end of another year is upon us. It's a good time to review your Aperture library, gage your activity, and plan for the next year. A few stats on my library:

• Total images in my library: 9817
• Images added in 2012: 1775
• 4-star images for 2012: 275
• 5-star images for 2012: 7
• Images in my backlog: 4338

A small library by professional standards, but useful to crunch the numbers nonetheless. I foresee needing disk in 2013. I added ~20% of my library this year, and also upgraded my camera so each RAW capture is ~18MB. Also, I've been using more plug-ins in recent months, resulting in larger PSD files in my library. If this photo pace keeps up - and I expect it to - I'll be looking to more disk space by mid 2013.

And my backlog...yikes...I'll need to double-down time spent there. Some of these are lower-rated photos I'm not focusing on. But a good chunk of them are images I'd imported into Aperture before settling on a rating and keyword strategy. And I want those "aligned" with the rest of my library. Still paying the price for over-aggressive imports without a good workflow in place.

When you review your Aperture activity for the year, you'll find Aperture makes it very easy to gather data. Enabling "Show Number of Versions..." in the Appearance tab in Preferences gives a quick glance of the number of images in a given project (all images, including rejects). For all photos in your library, click Photos and remove any filters.

For more detailed queries, turn to the filters. For example, to get the total number of captures in a given year, click on Photos and use a 'Date' filter (see picture). Similar tallies can be done within projects & folders and at very fine date/time granularity.

And if you use stacks, don't forget to open all your stacks before you tally images or you'll only get the stack picks.

After reviewing my library, I also got curious about this blog. A few stats:

• 42 posts in 2012 (including this one)
• 14 video uploads
• 38% returning visitor rate
• A huge jump in page views....over 17000 views in December 2012

I had to drill down into the page views. I was happily surprised at the numbers. Since I really started posting in earnest around July, looking at the page views for the 2nd half of 2012:

• 1470 in July 2012
• 1464 in August 2012
• 4106 in September 2012
• 9084 in October 2012
• 12141 in November 2012
• 17074 in December 2012 (and counting)

A very big thank you to all who have stopped by this blog. By far the most popular posts are:

• The free Picasa plug-in for Aperture
• Aperture workflow posts (initial post and 1-year check-in)
• Sharing from Aperture to Google+

I think I've beat Google+ sharing to death in recent weeks. In 2013, maybe I'll do a workflow video since those are popular. I'm open to suggestions, too.

Have a wonderful new year!