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Keeping Track of Files Emailed, Printed, Exported & More in Aperture 3

PhotoJoseph's picture
March 11, 2010 - 12:28pm

There’s a clever new metadata set in Aperture 3 called Photo Usage that keeps track of files that have been emailed, exported, ordered as print, ordered via book, or printed. And where there’s a metadata tag, there’s the ability to search.

The new criteria appear to be not included in any of the default Metadata sets, so to view them you’ll have to create a custom one. Open the Metadata tab, and from the drop-down list of metadata views, choose Edit…

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Aperture 3 Labels as Bookmarks

PhotoJoseph's picture
March 9, 2010 - 6:23pm

One of the new features in Aperture 3 are colored labels. Personally I wasn’t so sure what I’d do with them, but of course it’s always nice to see more options.

A feature I’ve always wanted was a way to bookmark an edit. Say I’m going through a 1,000 image shoot, and need to stop to do something else; maybe look at another project, or just shut down for the night. In Aperture 2, there was no way to know where I’d left off when I came back to the album. Sure, if it was the first pass I could just look for the unrated photos (assuming I was rating all of them… which I don’t). If it was a subsequent pass, there was simply no way to tell where I’d left off.

Until now.

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Aperture 3 White Balance Hidden Shortcut

PhotoJoseph's picture
March 4, 2010 - 9:33am

Here’s a little gem hidden in Aperture 3 that’s quite handy… a keyboard shortcut that’s not listed in the keyboard shortcut list, for setting White Balance.

To set White Balance on a photo, normally you’d click on the eyedropper in the White Balance Adjustment tool, then click on a neutral gray area of the photo. But now, just tap Command-Shift-W and that will call up the same tool. (The Adjustments tab does have to be active, however.)

Nice, quick, easy.

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Traveling to Singapore and Hong Kong

PhotoJoseph's picture
March 3, 2010 - 1:26pm

Hi ApertureExpert readers! I’m going to be traveling to Singapore then to Hong Kong towards the end of March… specifically I’ll be in Singapore from March 20-25, and Hong Kong from 25-29. I’m pretty busy in Singapore with the conference I’m speaking at, but hope to announce an Aperture seminar there very soon. HK however is pretty free at the moment. I’d love to do some kind of workshop, Aperture seminar, or at minimum a photowalk while there!

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What’s Happening on Import in Aperture 3

PhotoJoseph's picture
March 3, 2010 - 4:38am

The following is an excerpt from the updated “In-Depth Getting Started
 with 
Aperture 3” book I’m working on now. This is an entire new addition to the book and I’m excited to share it here just because of just how dramatically the import process is improved in Aperture 3.

They’re Importing… Right?

If you import a large quantity of photos, and/or are on a slower computer, you’ll notice that it takes some time to import the pictures. Which makes sense of course; Aperture is copying those pictures from the card or camera to your computer (which naturally takes time), but it’s doing a lot more than that. For the above import, here’s the process of what Aperture went through after clicking the Import button.

Lots to look at here (above), in two primary chunks. There’s the import, and then the processing. Notice that the initial “Processing Embedded JPEGs” is happening faster than the “Copying files to Aperture Library”.

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Large Library Upgraded with Aperture 3.0.1 Much Faster Than 3.0

PhotoJoseph's picture
March 3, 2010 - 2:57am

As some of you may have seen on the twitters, I upgraded to a glorious 27” iMac i7 with 8GB RAM yesterday. Beyond the obviously ho-boy’ness of this beauty, and the screamin’ speed (other Mac is a 15” MacBook Pro 2.93Ghz Core2Duo w/ 4GB RAM, so no slouch by any stretch), combining this iMac with Aperture 3.0.1 has seen a phenomenally dramatic speed improvement.

I’ve had this large, languishing Aperture library that spanned from 1997 to 2009 (in 2009 I started a new general-purpose library), and have been dreading upgrading that to Aperture 3. My smaller client-specific 17k image library took the better part of a day to upgrade, so this wasn’t looking to be an enjoyable date with destiny with this beast. But with the powerhouse i7 and the purportedly faster Aperture 3.0.1, last night I decided to kick off the upgrade for that beast of a library. I had a backup version of the library (of course) in the event that I just had to pull the plug in the morning and get back to work.

I decided to go the plain ol’ traditional route of just (*gasp*) upgrading the library. No fancy importing-to-upgrade, no turning off Faces, no fancy malarky of any sort. I just pointed Aperture and the old library, and said “go”. The only option you have is to process all old images with the new 3.0 processing engine (or not). I turned that off, figuring that since these are such old photos, if and when I decided to re-tweek an image, I’ll just do the upgrade one-by-one. To be completely fair, I did have “Maintain Previews for Project” disabled in the previous library, and hardly any previews actually rendered in there, but still the library file was 83.42GB.

So I kicked it off last night, and stuck around to watch the progress bar for a few %. Here’s what I saw.

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Deleting Photos in Aperture 3 (First, Second, Third Time’s the Charm)

PhotoJoseph's picture
February 24, 2010 - 5:59pm

Aperture 3 handles deleting files differently than Aperture 2, so here’s a little look at what’s happening.

When you first delete an image, project, or anything else from menu File > Delete or by tapping Command-Delete, it’s moved into the Aperture Trash. This is a fantastic new feature that makes it much, much harder to accidentally delete your photos. Believe me, I wish I’d had this feature a year ago. If I did, I’d still have that collection of photos of Barack Obama speaking in San Francisco in November 2007. As it is though, I didn’t, and so I don’t.

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Quickly Assigning Places in Aperture 3

PhotoJoseph's picture
February 20, 2010 - 2:03am

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.

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Upgraded Library is Smaller!

PhotoJoseph's picture
February 17, 2010 - 12:48pm

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.

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