It’s no Lightroom 5 beta, but it’s an update…

I’ve received several messages asking about this in the last few weeks, so that means it’s time to write it up!

You may have at some point seen a notification badge show up on your Aperture icon, like you’d see on Mail or Messages, and wonder what it’s for. The simple answer is it’s from a Shared Photo Stream. Whenever someone “likes” or comments on a photo you’ve shared with them, you’ll get a notification anywhere you’ve enabled Photo Stream. That could be any iOS device on iOS 6, or it could also be in iPhoto or Aperture.

We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!

When you see the badge, if you open Photo Stream in Aperture you should see a blue dot on the Shared Photo Stream that has a notification, and if you open that, you’ll see blue dot(s) on the photos that have new likes or comments.[more]

I just installed the “full Nik Collection” (only $126 with the ApertureExpert discount!) and much to my chagrin noticed that a collection of recent Silver Efex Pro 2 presets I’d created were missing. This was kind of a Big Deal™ because I’m working on a gallery show, have been experimenting with settings, and really needed my history of saved attempts to go back on.

Posting this for my friend Matthew London, a photographer on Treasure Island looking for a photo editing assistant who’s proficient in Aperture.

Check his ad here… I know he’s gotten quite a bit of interest but is still looking for “the one”.

http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/med/3683097768.html

This is huge news for those who’ve been drooling over Nik Software plugins but hedging on the price…

The entire collection is now just $149!

Hi folks, this just landed in my inbox… onOne Software is having a 50% off sale. Click through below to get the discount!

From OnOne Software…

The first part of a three-part post on Photofocus titled “Organizing Your Aperture Library” is now online! Be sure to check that out, even if you’re 100% organized. There may be some new tips in there for ya!

I don’t know the schedule for parts 2 and 3, so be sure to check back for those.

JPEGmini is an app that does one thing — it re-compresses your JPEGs into smaller JPEGs, with virtually no quality loss. In this post, we look at the viability of applying this to your entire Aperture library as a way to reduce the footprint of your JPEG previews, and therefore your entire Aperture library.

Why buck tradition… it seems every other store in America is having a sale today, so why not ApertureExpert, as well?

to get 25% off

PresidentsDay2013 code on checkout

This code is good through the middle of tomorrow (2/19/2013 @ 12 noon MST, to be precise) so don’t delay!

I had heard about this on twitter, but not seen it myself until today. I was opening images to edit in various plugins when out of nowhere, this dialog started popping up:

Aperture says: This image cannot be rendered for editing because Aperture does not support the image format. Say whaaa?

Recently I was introduced to a backup application called Arq, by Haystack Software. This is a $29 app that gives you a clean interface to Amazon’s S3 or Glacier servers, allowing you to use Amazon as a backup service. Since Glacier is only $.01 per GB per month (about $10 per TB), it’s a pretty good deal. There are initial upload and then retrieval charges to consider as well, but the peace of mind of online/cloud backup is hard to put a price on.

Granted, you can buy a 3TB USB 3 hard drive today for just $130 [Amazon.com link] and ship that to a friend on the other side of the country for safe keeping, but by now I think we all know the advantages of automated, offsite backup.

Backup Bouncer Test

Anyway, this article isn’t about Arq or Glacier. It’s about a disturbing statement I read on the Haystack website, which I immediately challenged Backblaze on. As you know I’m a huge supporter of Backblaze (having written a very popular post on the topic “Cloud Backup; Backblaze in the Real World” last year), so seeing anything negative about a service I rely on is sure to get my hackles up!

The statement in question is under the header “Accuracy”, around the middle of the Arq info page. It states that Backblaze failed 19 out of 20 tests using a test suite called “Backup Bouncer”. In fact, the list goes on to show that Carbonite failed 20 out of 20, Dropbox failed 19 of 20, and so-on. Disturbing numbers, to say the least!

In complete fairness to Haystack Software, the folks who wrote this article, they did state “What do these results mean? For most scenarios, probably nothing. Any of those backup apps can restore your file contents — photos, Office docs, music files. You’ll still be able to view your restored photos, edit your restored Office docs, play your restored music. But the dates on the files might not be correct, for instance.” But regardless; 19 out of 20 failures does not instill confidence.

Backblaze’s response

So naturally, I asked Backblaze, and am quoting their response below.[more]

ShootDotEdit introduced their Aperture workflow about a year ago, first discussed on ApertureExpert here; “ShootDotEdit Now Offers an Aperture Workflow”. I was very excited about this at the time, because ShootDotEdit were the first to offer their professional photo editing services customized for Aperture users. Basically, if you shoot big events like weddings and don’t want to do the heavy lifting for the photo edit yourself, you can outsource that to SDE. At first launch though, they did not include their “cull” service for Aperture users, which meant you still had to at least do the initial edit on your own.

However, that is no longer the case![more]