Okay – so I have been like a whining baby that last few days. Let me say a couple of positive things about Apple Aperture as we are winding the week down. The first thing that I want to say is that in my opinion it is still the best photographic tool in it’s class by a large margin. This doesn’t mean that it cannot stand some room for improvement. It can but… Aperture blows the living crap out of anything else out there in terms of an organizational...
Woooo Whooo, I received my very first question from an Aperture File Management eBook customer. Of course I answered his specific question ASAP but something that I touch on in the book crossed my mind as well that I thought people considering Aperture vs. Lightroom at this point may want to consider. Even a few of you Aperture old timers may find this a little interesting. I have written about Lightroom’s and Aperture’s comparative file management capabilities before but I wanted to add a different perspective or twist to...
I have explained this technique to speed up your work-flow about a million times over on the Aperture support forums as well as via email. I thought I would post it here hoping it may be helpful to a few readers as well as saving my time from having to re-re-re-rewrite it over and over again. Let’s say you have a project with a bunch of images that you need to crop to a specific aspect ratio. There is a really fast and easy way to do this without...
In response to a couple of questions that I received regarding the Aperture File Management post from a week or so back I thought that I would share a quick tip for those struggling to get their Aperture libraries beaten into submission. If you have more than a couple of images Aperture’s search tools are a god send. One of the concepts that I mentioned briefly in the File Management post was that you could use any criteria that you would like to create a selection to subsequently use...
My oh my. For the first time ever the email volume of questions, suggestions, requests, and reprisals has outstripped my capacity to answer them in a timely manner. What shall I do, I guess I will work hard this weekend to get through them. I thought work-flow and organization and efficiency was a boring topic. I thought that simple things were simple. I tried to stay away from the “how to make a flat image pop” but here in the back corner of the internet there does seem to...
Where and how Aperture keeps original image files, referred to as masters, is a topic of constant discussion and for some – constant confusion. I hope to shed some light on the topic for new users and maybe show some old dogs a couple of new tricks in the file management department. Starting at the beginning Aperture allows you to choose two different approaches to managing your original image files. The first way is called “managed” masters. If you choose to use “managed” masters Aperture will automatically copy all...
As I have mentioned on about a thousand or so occasions Aperture’s ability to have a different image or image version show up on top of a stack for each and every album that you create is a huge benefit to developing an efficient work-flow. For those of you that are unfamiliar with albums and album picks you may want to take a look at the organization PDF. One of the features that I use all the time is the fact that new versions created in the context of...
If you have been using Aperture for more than a little while, especially on a laptop you may be struggling with storage space issues. Referenced masters to the rescue – sort of. For the readers not familiar with referenced masters a brief review is in order. With Aperture there are two options for storing the image files that you import. Option one – the default – is called managed masters. Using managed masters Aperture copies your precious original image files into it’s mysterious secret abyss never to be seen...
A few weeks ago a question from a new Aperture users came up on the Apple Aperture Support forums. The question – “Is there any way to keep notes for a project as a whole” – sort of like meta data for the whole project. My instant reaction was no but another user posted an idea to use a web journal as a way to keep notes about the project. This is a great idea and I refined it a little bit and posted another response – How about...
I really should title this tip something more like “Quick and Dirty Project Recovery When You Are In a Bind” or something like that. If you ever find yourself in the unenviable position of being on a tight deadline for a wedding, story, commercial client, whatever and you have a problem accessing your Aperture library you only have a few options that are supported by Apple. Option one – recover your entire library from a vault, time machine backup, or other backup if you have one (and you should).
