Hi all,

Thanks for your patience while I’ve been busy in Singapore and Hong Kong. I’m flying home tomorrow, and will finally get to catch up on this site! In the meantime, a little housekeeping…

Reader and contributor Pablo Yanez has posted a detailed “help me Obi-Wan” solutions-list over in the forums. If you’re still fighting a problematic upgrade from Aperture 2 to 3, run don’t walk and check this post out. You just might save your sanity.

Article is here. Thanks Pablo!

A new update hit today, Aperture SlideShow 1.1 Support. According to Software Update…

This update addresses an issue affecting the playback of HD video clips used in Aperture 3 slideshows on Snow Leopard. Audio and video tracks now remain properly synced in video clips that have been trimmed.

The update is recommended for all users of Aperture 3.

There’s a clever new metadata set in Aperture 3 called Photo Usage that keeps track of files that have been emailed, exported, ordered as print, ordered via book, or printed. And where there’s a metadata tag, there’s the ability to search.

The new criteria appear to be not included in any of the default Metadata sets, so to view them you’ll have to create a custom one. Open the Metadata tab, and from the drop-down list of metadata views, choose Edit…

One of the new features in Aperture 3 are colored labels. Personally I wasn’t so sure what I’d do with them, but of course it’s always nice to see more options.

A feature I’ve always wanted was a way to bookmark an edit. Say I’m going through a 1,000 image shoot, and need to stop to do something else; maybe look at another project, or just shut down for the night. In Aperture 2, there was no way to know where I’d left off when I came back to the album. Sure, if it was the first pass I could just look for the unrated photos (assuming I was rating all of them… which I don’t). If it was a subsequent pass, there was simply no way to tell where I’d left off.

Until now.

In updating my eBook “In-Depth Getting Started with Aperture 3”, updating screenshots and the like, I noticed a few subtle changes that don’t necessarily deserver a full “tip” post, but are worth sharing here.

Thanks to everyone for your support and patience… the new “In-Depth Getting Started with Aperture 3“ eBook is OUT! I’ll be sending out new download codes to everyone who pre-purchased right away.

Here’s a little gem hidden in Aperture 3 that’s quite handy… a keyboard shortcut that’s not listed in the keyboard shortcut list, for setting White Balance.

To set White Balance on a photo, normally you’d click on the eyedropper in the White Balance Adjustment tool, then click on a neutral gray area of the photo. But now, just tap Command-Shift-W and that will call up the same tool. (The Adjustments tab does have to be active, however.)

Nice, quick, easy.

Hi ApertureExpert readers! I’m going to be traveling to Singapore then to Hong Kong towards the end of March… specifically I’ll be in Singapore from March 20-25, and Hong Kong from 25-29. I’m pretty busy in Singapore with the conference I’m speaking at, but hope to announce an Aperture seminar there very soon. HK however is pretty free at the moment. I’d love to do some kind of workshop, Aperture seminar, or at minimum a photowalk while there!

The following is an excerpt from the updated “In-Depth Getting Started
 with 
Aperture 3” book I’m working on now. This is an entire new addition to the book and I’m excited to share it here just because of just how dramatically the import process is improved in Aperture 3.

They’re Importing… Right?

If you import a large quantity of photos, and/or are on a slower computer, you’ll notice that it takes some time to import the pictures. Which makes sense of course; Aperture is copying those pictures from the card or camera to your computer (which naturally takes time), but it’s doing a lot more than that. For the above import, here’s the process of what Aperture went through after clicking the Import button.

Lots to look at here (above), in two primary chunks. There’s the import, and then the processing. Notice that the initial “Processing Embedded JPEGs” is happening faster than the “Copying files to Aperture Library”.

As some of you may have seen on the twitters, I upgraded to a glorious 27” iMac i7 with 8GB RAM yesterday. Beyond the obviously ho-boy’ness of this beauty, and the screamin’ speed (other Mac is a 15” MacBook Pro 2.93Ghz Core2Duo w/ 4GB RAM, so no slouch by any stretch), combining this iMac with Aperture 3.0.1 has seen a phenomenally dramatic speed improvement.

I’ve had this large, languishing Aperture library that spanned from 1997 to 2009 (in 2009 I started a new general-purpose library), and have been dreading upgrading that to Aperture 3. My smaller client-specific 17k image library took the better part of a day to upgrade, so this wasn’t looking to be an enjoyable date with destiny with this beast. But with the powerhouse i7 and the purportedly faster Aperture 3.0.1, last night I decided to kick off the upgrade for that beast of a library. I had a backup version of the library (of course) in the event that I just had to pull the plug in the morning and get back to work.

I decided to go the plain ol’ traditional route of just (*gasp*) upgrading the library. No fancy importing-to-upgrade, no turning off Faces, no fancy malarky of any sort. I just pointed Aperture and the old library, and said “go”. The only option you have is to process all old images with the new 3.0 processing engine (or not). I turned that off, figuring that since these are such old photos, if and when I decided to re-tweek an image, I’ll just do the upgrade one-by-one. To be completely fair, I did have “Maintain Previews for Project” disabled in the previous library, and hardly any previews actually rendered in there, but still the library file was 83.42GB.

So I kicked it off last night, and stuck around to watch the progress bar for a few %. Here’s what I saw.

‘tis a week for updates. First Aperture 3.0.1 and now more RAW support… go get yours now! http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1007

Aperture 3 is a 64-bit app, but many of the plug-ins aren’t yet updated to run in 64-bit. However, lucky lucky me, the SmugMug plug-in by David Holmes is! In fact it appears it was done 10 days ago. Thanks David!

Why does this matter? (More on 64-bit itself towards the end.)

Apple just released an update for Aperture 3, version 3.0.1. Here’s the support article on it; go grab it and report back if it fixes any of your issues!

What’s included? Here’s the list…

Aperture 3 handles deleting files differently than Aperture 2, so here’s a little look at what’s happening.

When you first delete an image, project, or anything else from menu File > Delete or by tapping Command-Delete, it’s moved into the Aperture Trash. This is a fantastic new feature that makes it much, much harder to accidentally delete your photos. Believe me, I wish I’d had this feature a year ago. If I did, I’d still have that collection of photos of Barack Obama speaking in San Francisco in November 2007. As it is though, I didn’t, and so I don’t.