Eight great prizes — including two Flush Mount Albums — are part of a fantastic giveaway from MyPhotoCreations on PhotoBookGirl. For entry details, head on over to to PhotoBookGirl.com. Move quick; the contest ends on November 29th!

So many people on so many forums have been struggling for so many days on this Aperture to iLife sharing issue — some quite literally spending dozens of hours trying to solve the problem — that I thought I’d share how I personally handle this, and why this hasn’t affected me at all.

I don’t use the iLife Sharing. It’s not because I don’t like the idea—on the contrary, I think it’s brilliant. However I work with multiple computers, multiple libraries, and multiple devices. The sharing system works best if you have one Library, on one computer, use iLife on that one computer, and sync your iPad/iPod/etc to that one copy of iTunes, and so on. The system is beautiful in its simplicity.

My setup isn’t simple.

My Setup

I have an iMac that hosts my main Libraries. Even though I’ve now merged most Libraries, I do still have a couple client-specific ones that I don’t want to merge. So right there, we have a sharing problem—which library is shared? The answer is, the last one that was open. That might not always be the one you want to get to, though.

I also have a MacBook Pro that stores working Libraries as I travel. And I use the fantastic Project export feature from Aperture on the iMac to move projects over to my MacBook Pro so I can catch up on old projects while traveling (for example, I’m currently copying a managed 127GB Library across my network so I can catch up on a wedding edit and some other projects on the flights to Bangkok tomorrow). Point is, I have projects on that computer, too.

Long ago my Aperture library grew beyond what I could — or wanted to — carry around on my laptop. I keep the main library on a desktop Mac (currently a 2.8 GHz iMac 27" Core i7 w/ 8 GB RAM) and add working projects to it as I came back from jobs or travels, which of course got a lot easier in Aperture 3. But there are times when I’m away from my system and yet need to get to a photo on there. Perhaps a client needs something that I wasn’t expecting, or I want to send something to a potential client; whatever. I want to be able to get to my photos anytime, from anywhere.

Remote Access

I use MobileMe’s “Back to My Mac” feature to access my system remotely, which may not be perfect but it works well enough. These days it’s a lot more reliable than it used to be.

This is a topic that’s shown up here on this blog, on the flickr Aperture group as well as on the Apple boards, and it appears that, at least for one user, the source of the problem has been found.

The Problem

The problem has been people’s Aperture Libraries not showing up in iLife, Mail, etc—basically the Media Browser connection was broken. You can share your Aperture Library with the rest of your Mac by enabling Share previews with iLife and iWork in the Preferences:

This tip came via reader @blakecaldwell over at F-STOPPING…

As you may have heard, if you upgrade to both Aperture 3.1 and iLife ‘11, you gain all the exciting new slide show themes that Steve showed on stage for iPhoto ‘11—inside of Aperture! I’ve just installed mine, and there’s a load of new themes.

Here’s a complete list of Slideshow themes. Themes with the ** next to them are new… there’s six of ‘em!

I missed this one on the original review, and it’s a subtle but welcome improvement. The so-called “Choose an Aperture Library” dialog (yeah, I dug into the manual to see what Apple called it), which you can call up by holding down the Option key on launch, or by selecting the menu File > Switch to Library > Other/New…, has seen an overhaul.

The Stevenote ended a few hours ago, and I spent the last few hours poking around Aperture 3.1.

I’ve been working with Morten Scheel (@AFringeDweller) for a while developing some AppleScripts for the ApertureExpert community. We’ve come up with some pretty clever ones to start with, and we’re looking for more to develop. If you have any ideas, please contribute them to the new AppleScript Forum!

The ability to have multiple external editors in Aperture 3 is an oft-asked for feature, and hopefully it will come properly in a future release. What we really want is to ability to have a list of external editors to choose from, just like we have a list of plug-ins to choose from, right? But in the meantime, we need a work-around. Here’s one I’ve come up with. It’s not ideal, but with a little setup it can be relatively quick and painless to execute.

Basically, create a folder and fill it with aliases of all the applications you might want to configure Aperture to open in, make that folder easy to get to, and then when you need to switch, open the Preferences in Aperture, and the list of apps is only a click away.

Here’s a step-by-step…

Aperture 3 is full of fantastic Adjustments that you can apply to your images. It’s also full of fantastic keyboard shortcuts. And better still, you can make your own keyboard shortcuts for nearly any command that you like. But what happens when there’s no command to apply a keyboard shortcut to? Why, you make one, of course!

In this tutorial, we’ll look first at understanding auto Levels and auto Curves, then at creating Adjustment Presets for them, and finally at applying Keyboard Commands (shortcuts) to the lot of them. Let’s get started!