A user asked in the forum if there was a way to attach potentially confidential data to a photo (for example a model’s phone number and address) so that you can easily find it, but not have to worry about it showing up on Flickr or wherever if you want to share your images — but not strip all the metadata.

Reader gfsymon pointed out something that’s in the manual, but I have to admit I didn’t realize (RTFM anyone?) and that’s that the Custom metadata fields are not included in an image export, even with full metadata turned on.

Custom fields can be used for all sorts of things, and this confidential aspect just adds one more reason to use it. Many plugins actually create custom fields for you; you may have several already built and not even realize it!

To see your custom list, switch to the Metadata tab and from the drop-down, choose Edit…. Then from the gear menu, choose Manage Custom Fields…. You can also get to this menu from Aperture > Presets > Metadata.

Custom Metadata Fields in Aperture 3

As you can see from my screenshot above, I have several labeled “SmugMug”. Those were created by various SmugMug upload utilities I’ve used in the past, and they are used to store info about where they were published, so the plugins can locate and replace existing images on the site. Cool!

I manually built some to keep track of copyright office submissions. Here you can see those tags in play:

There wasn’t much notice, but the session went live today and it’s already online for download… check out Session 018, all about Export — everything you find in the Export menu, including Versions, Masters, Metadata and 3rd party plugins. Pretty important to know how to get the most out of export if you want the rest of the world to see your photography!

(If you’re just joining us, start with Tip 1)

(If you’re just joining us, start with Tip 1)

(If you’re just joining us, start with Tip 1)

Tiny tip for today, but it can be a helpful one if you aren’t aware of this.

In the Aperture preferences, you can enable an option to “Show numbers of versions for projects and albums”. You’ll find it under the Appearance tab.

“Show number of versions for projects and albums” option in Aperture’s preferences

This is a simple thing, but it means that when you’re looking at your Library list, you can immediately see how many photos are in each Project or Album. If you need 10 selected photos for a client or job or blog post or whatever, you can glance at that Album you’re adding photos into and see how many are there instantly. When looking for “that big collection of photos I shot at that thing but didn’t label properly”, seeing 300 photos in one and 2 in another is a pretty good indicator. When scanning your library for massive Projects that really should be broken up into more than one, or tiny projects that really should be merged (do I really need a project with 2 photos in it? No.), this is great info to have at a glance.

That image count can come in very handy

But notice that it does not give you an image count for a Folder. Why is that?

[There’s an important update to this at the end… be sure to read all the way through, and to read the comments as well — particularly those by Butch Miller.]

Aperture has built-in support for flickr and Facebook, but sometimes that just doesn’t cut it for you. Or you may simply need to upload a photo to a service that isn’t built in; it doesn’t matter which, there are dozens (hundreds?) of places and reasons to push your photos.

For those of you with iPhoto on the iPad, you may have played with the Journal feature. It’s quite a neat way to display photos, although it’s very isolated. Once published there’s no discovery infrastructure like on Flickr, and other than emailing the URL to people or manually tweeting/facebooking it, there really isn’t a great way to get it seen.

All that said, that doesn’t mean it isn’t cool ;-)

In this entry I’ll cover how to get your Aperture-treated photos into iPhoto for iOS, then what to do once you’ve created the Journal. I’m not going to get into how to actually make the journal itself. I may do that another time.

Here’s the end result… click the screenshot to be taken to the real gallery (just be sure to come back here!).

Click to view the iPhoto for iOS generated Journal gallery

Pretty cool, isn’t it? Yeah I thought so too! The images are really large, so if you tap on one to open it, and then click the arrows to go full screen, since these are 2048 wide images, not only do they look perfect on the new iPad, they even look great full screen on a 27” iMac (2560 wide).