Folks,

I’ve been playing with Places a lot lately (one of my favorite new features; I can’t wait to get 13 years of digital photos onto my map!) and in doing so have been figuring out the fastest way to do that. Of course I don’t have geodata for all these old photos, so this means just using the Places feature to assign a general location (i.e. Santa Monica Pier) to groups of pictures.

If all the photos in a project are in one location, it’s really easy to do. But when you have a few different locations in one project, it can get a little trickier. I tried doing it in the metadata inspector (oops, you can’t do batch locations there), and dragging things on the map (but that can get tedious finding those spots), and finally realized that as you would expect, Apple’s made it really easy to do… you just have to click in the right place.

Yowzers I’m gonna be busy for a while! I’ve just finished outlining what’s going to be a ginormous video on Aperture 3, aptly titled “The Complete Guide to What’s New in Aperture 3”. It will be available exclusively through MacCreate, and is available for pre-order now. Why buy early?

That’s a shock… the 17,000+ image Aperture 2 Library I’ve imported into a clean Aperture 3 Library was 21.27 GB originally (without Previews). It’s now only 16.65 GB. That’s a nice surprise! I’ve already run Faces on it (big mistake… running Faces on a concert series; hellloooo audience!!! Talk about a chore rejecting all those unknown people! LOL), and have upgrade about 2/3 of the Library to the new processing engine.

I mentioned in the previous post that the updated Smart Album has a very cool and powerful new feature; you can now control what it’s searching inside of, whereas previously it simply searched based on where it was created—even after you moved it.

I’ve upgrade a client Library that was organized largely on Smart Albums, and have discovered that the vast majority of them are pointing at the wrong place. How did that happen? Because we didn’t have the “Duplicate Project Structure” feature that you have now. Let me explain.

One of the features I was hoping for the most in Aperture 3 was Faces. OK, I’ve probably said that already about most of the new features in Aperture 3, but come on… it’s a great upgrade!!

I’ve put the library update on hold so I could play with a few things in Aperture tonight. I created a new library and imported a few hundred iPhone photos. Perhaps not the easiest thing for Faces to deal with, since these are pretty low resolution and of dubious quality, but hey, it’s what was handy… and, they have GPS data for Places, too. Sweet.

A note: The following is a result of me writing this entry as I go. It’s NOT a cleaned-up, “how to use Faces” entry. So come along for the ride… maybe we’ll all learn a thing or two!

Readers,

Don’t forget the amazing site MacCreate and its massive Aperture community. I’m contributing there as well, and deliberately not duplicating tips on MacCreate and ApertureExpert. There’s a LOT of activity on the Aperture site right now over there, as it has multiple contributors and some very dedicated people.

So with a whole 30 minutes to spare, I’ve finally begun my own move to Aperture 3. I took one of my client libraries and am starting with that. The fortunate thing of being forced to wait this week is I have the benefit of learning what has and hasn’t worked for other people. While this particular library is quite small (only 17,398 photos), I wanted to take the extreme-caution route. Here’s what I’m doing for this upgrade.

As deliriously silly as this sounds, I’ve barely spent any time in Aperture yet myself. Since Tuesday night, I’ve been preparing for and shooting a series of Aperture 3 training videos for the fabulous wedding photographer Sara France. So most of my Aperture exploration has been limited to watching her and reading websites! Tragic, I know.

Anyway there’s a combination of features that are listed on Apple’s “200+ New Features” page that truly make this a release a game changer, and that’s the ability to Merge and Sync Libraries, and to Export as Library. Why is this so important? Read on…

There have been reports of a few concerns with the upgrade process on this site, and while I may eventually get to respond to them individually, for the moment I wanted to share a very useful link on apple.com and some general tips on making this update as painless as possible.

First and foremost—make no mistake, this is a HUGE upgrade to your library. A lot has to happen for the library to be completely “version 3” ready. The library structure itself has changed, which is what allows you to do things like switch between libraries without relaunching. There’s a new RAW engine, so the images have to be re-processed by that (that can happen later though) before the new features like Curves and Brushes are available. The images all have to be processed for Faces (again, this can be deferred) and that in itself is incredibly labor intensive. The master files must be polled for EXIF data to look for GPS info, but that is pretty quick.

There’s an invaluable article on apple.com that you should read before upgrading if you have a large library—detailed explanations of what I’ve just stated above in there, clear as a bell.

For those who follow me on twitter, you’ll know I was very excited about the addition of curves to Aperture 3. I suspect there’s a lot to the Adjustment here, perhaps more than I’m familiar with, but I just had a moment to look at them and yep… them be curves!!

Why do I care? I’m used to working with curves from a lot of different applications, and it’s a familiar way for me to get the look I want. Quarter-tones in Levels are great and can do pretty much the same thing, but frankly I just like using Curves.

Ok this is just funny… Faces grabbed these today.

A very quick note here as I’m about to start shooting a series of Aperture training videos with Sara France, but I wanted to share my experience with integrating the iPhone’s GPS capability and photos off my Canon (with no GPS capability) in Aperture 3’s awesome new Places feature.

Minimal screenshots for now, sorry… I just don’t have time.

Hi all,

I was up at 6am to check out Aperture 3 but then have been speaking at my alma mater at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo since noon. Now I’m about to drive home, so won’t be pushing Aperture until tonight. But ooh boy it’s gonna be fun! On the way home I’ll shoot with my Canon and my iPhone to test out the hybrid GPS places system in Aperture. Can’t wait to post all about that… and more!

Don’t miss this one… you can pre-order and lock-in the introductory prices for the Aperture 3 “Getting Started” eBook at $19.97, and a new Adjustments Preset Pack for just $9.97. These prices will go up once the final products are released, in one to two weeks.

Jump over to the store and check ‘em out!

Like the rest of us I’m downloading the trial now… I will be reporting back throughout the day!