I’m so excited, the book is done and up for sale! Read all about it and be sure to download the free preview!

As I hinted at when Aperture 3 dropped to just $79 in the App Store (discussed here and here), I felt that a matching price drop might be due for my eBooks, formerly priced at $19.97 and $24.97.

I’m thrilled to announce that it’s time.

I run a tight ship on my Aperture Library. I keep all the photos referenced in the main Library on my iMac, but when I’m on the road using the MacBook Air, I import photos into an empty Library as Managed, then merge that (managed) Air Library with my (referenced) iMac Library when I return home.

That means that I have to get the Managed files out of this iMac Library that I just imported.

The Problem

It used to be easy—all I had to do was search for Managed Files, and Relocate them. There’s a Smart Album already set up (actually… hmm, maybe I built that… I actually don’t recall, it’s been this way for so long) under my Library that shows Managed files, like this:

(click to view larger)

However now that Aperture has these great sharing features to Flickr and Facebook, any images previously existing on those services that have been pulled down to Aperture now show up in the Managed search. They look like this:

Hi Folks, Joseph here, your friendly ApertureExpert…

I had an idea last night that had loads of time to bounce around my brain on a long drive and longer flight, and I want to pose it to the hive mind to see what you think. I make no bones that this is a mild rip-off of Chase Jarvis’s amazing createLIVE idea, but different enough that I can admit it’s a spawn of his brainchild :)

A former colleague John Whitehead sent me an email to comment on my thoughts in the previous entry, What Does This $120 Price Drop Mean?. In his message he suggested another reason that Apple may have reduced the price, and how they could make up the difference… and that triggered a further thought that I

I’m going to borrow a page from the book of my friend David Schloss, who runs MacCreate.com, and post an op-ed piece here with the full disclaimer that this is opinion(ated)

Gotta love this… go Aperture 3, go App Store, go Apple!

You read that right… Aperture 3 is available for just $79.99 on the band spanking new Mac App Store.

To get the new Store, you’ll have to run Software Update and bump up to Mac OS X 10.6.6. There’s not a whole lotta info on 10.6.6 itself, but here’s the kb article if you’re interested.

Once you’ve run the update, you’ll see a shiny new icon in your dock!

Launch that bad boy, search for Aperture, and check this out… 

Of course if you already have Aperture installed, you’ll see this…

Last week I talked about correcting time zones on import in Aperture 3, in the article “Original Photo Capture Timestamp Hidden in the Import Window”. If you were importing from multiple cameras, and some were correct but some weren’t, it’s not hard to deduce how to correct for that—import the right ones normally, then the rest using the tips in that article.

But what if you’ve already imported your photos, and suddenly find yourself with out-of-order photos in the browser, as I did yesterday after a shoot for my new book?

I was shooting with multiple cameras, and while I’m normally very good at setting the time on all cameras before a shoot, in this case I forgot one. I was shooting with five different bodies, including one from borrowlenses.com (love those guys… give ‘em some love!). I was importing in the field into the MacBook Air 11” (which performed very well for my needs in the field… I’ll write more on that another time though), and realized later that these were time stamped incorrectly.

There’s two ways to fix this… the easy way, and the hard way. How you handle this depends entirely on your file naming workflow.

With a multi-hundred-thousand image library staring you in the face, it can be a bit daunting looking for “that photo you know you took” all those years ago—especially if you aren’t (or at least, weren’t) diligent about adding keywords and other relavent metadata.

I just found an image I was looking for that I knew I had (but wasn’t easy to find), and I thought I’d share the process. Sometimes a little sleuthing can save you a ton of work.

The shot I was seeking is for a new eBook I’m writing on photography. In it I have a chapter on stabilizing the camera, and I am talking about the Joby Gorillapod. I knew that years ago on a trip to Hawaii I’d wrapped my dSLR around a stalk of wet bamboo for a long exposure, and I knew I’d taken a photo of that. So, off to find it.

Search by Name

First, I searched the Library for “Hawaii”. One thing I do well is name my projects, and I was quite sure that whenever that trip was, chances were I’d included “Hawaii” in the project name.

I knew the shot wasn’t in a helicopter (so the “2007-03-04 | Oahu Hawaii Helo flight” wasn’t going to have it), and it couldn’t have been in 2000 because that pre-dates the Gorillapod, but there was a collection of 1,046 photos labeled “2007-02-25~03-03 Hawaii, Maui & Oahu” that was promising. As you can see from the screenshot above, there are a series of Albums in there, and I scanned those names but none sounded right. I ended up just looking at the whole project, and found something promising.

A user recently asked about fixing time zones when you are importing photos that were shot in one time zone, possibly set accurately (possibly not), but while sitting in another time zone. If you find an accurate time stamp to be critical to your workflow (as many of us do), having this right is quite important.

It’s a pretty big discussion, and I will do an in-depth tip on that sooner or later, and with it include syncing GPS data (which is where things get really messy). But today while importing some photos I made while in Slovenia in October (yeah… I’m behind) I noticed something I’d never seen before.

Verifying Capture Time

The very first thing I did was to open a .CR2 file in Preview to check out the EXIF data and see what time it had set. I know for a fact that my camera was set correctly, so before I even went into Aperture (expecting to have some time zone confusion), I verified the time.

As you can see, the image was captured on October 12, 2010, at 17:51:48

Now what?

Apple has just released the Digital Camera RAW Compatibility Update 3.5, adding RAW image support for a handful of new cameras to Aperture 3 and iPhoto ‘11. The camera list includes:

A kb (knowledge base) article was released explaining in much more detail what was fixed in the recent Aperture 3.1.1 update. No huge surprises here personally (many of these fixes were things I never knew were broken), but worth a read if you’ve discovered some bizarre activity in Aperture and are curious if it’s been fixed, or just to get more details on the iLife, Flickr, etc. updates.

I can hear the collective sigh if relief; feel the exhale on the back of my neck of all Aperture + iLife users plagued by the browsing problems introduced by Aperture 3.1—an absolutely fantastic release for many reasons, but undeniably hindered by a serious iLife compatibility issue.

Aperture 3.1.1 sets out to resolve those problems. Sound off in the comments if this update fixes your woes—or if not. Let’s hope for no “not!” remarks down below.