Aperture and Metadata Display

RB | 11 August 2008 | Aperture PDF Guides, Apple Aperture, Articles | Aperture 2, Aperture PDF Guides, Apple, interface customization, Metadata, Workflow | 3 Comments

In the screen shot to the left you can see just about every metadata display option known to man, or at least known to Aperture. We have the metadata pane in the inspector, the metadata pane in the HUD, metadata overlays in both the viewer and the browser and last but certainly not least the poor old (and sometimes annoying) metadata tooltips. This short article will guide you through how you can use them in your image workflow.

I found the metadata display options fairly intuitive myself but based on conversations with other Aperture users and a bunch of questions over on the Apple support forums I figured a quick guide to using some of the metadata customization and display features could be useful to people. I actually think it’s pretty amazing how underutilized a lot of the user interface customization features are within Aperture. In my opinion this is one of Apertures greatest strengths compared to other products such as Adobe Lightroom.

I will try to cover some of the other user interface customization features in future articles but this is a pretty good place to start. Without further adieu here is the Guide to Customizing Aperture 2 Metadata Display: Aperture Metadata Display PDF (2226) - 2.08 MB. If anyone would would like to post corrections, ideas, or ways that you use any of these features feel free to comment or e-mail me.

3 Comments

Joe Kroeger says

25 December 08 at 4:56pm

Typos (private to RB) -
Introduction, second sentence, last word should be plural.
Introduction, ninth sentence, “thing” should be “think”.
Metadata Views, first sentence, “hear” should be “heart”.
Metadata Views, second paragraph, first sentence, delete “the” after “bottom”.
Page three, first line, “weather” should be “whether”.
Etc.
RB says

01 January 09 at 11:42am

Joe,

Thanks a lot – really. I am in dire need of an editor – want the job? The pay sucks but the benefits are great.

New version is now on-line.

RB
Tom Myler says

21 August 09 at 12:18am

Thank you — this is very helpful information. Customizing the meta-data views in the Aperture Viewer is a bit awkward with the “special” meta-data fields that are displayed twice. Your document helped me a lot.