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DPHOTO: A Viable Alternative to MobileMe?

PhotoJoseph's picture
April 23, 2012 - 12:00am

With MobileMe Galleries in their death throws, many users are looking for an alternative. The topic comes up here every so often, and of course there are loads of different places to show off your photos, such as Flickr or Facebook or Smugmug, but none that seemed to offer the simplicity and elegance of MobileMe.

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Confidential Metadata Fields

PhotoJoseph's picture
April 22, 2012 - 12:00am

A user asked in the forum if there was a way to attach potentially confidential data to a photo (for example a model’s phone number and address) so that you can easily find it, but not have to worry about it showing up on Flickr or wherever if you want to share your images — but not strip all the metadata.

Reader gfsymon pointed out something that’s in the manual, but I have to admit I didn’t realize (RTFM anyone?) and that’s that the Custom metadata fields are not included in an image export, even with full metadata turned on.

Custom fields can be used for all sorts of things, and this confidential aspect just adds one more reason to use it. Many plugins actually create custom fields for you; you may have several already built and not even realize it!

To see your custom list, switch to the Metadata tab and from the drop-down, choose Edit…. Then from the gear menu, choose Manage Custom Fields…. You can also get to this menu from Aperture > Presets > Metadata.

Custom Metadata Fields in Aperture 3

As you can see from my screenshot above, I have several labeled “SmugMug”. Those were created by various SmugMug upload utilities I’ve used in the past, and they are used to store info about where they were published, so the plugins can locate and replace existing images on the site. Cool!

I manually built some to keep track of copyright office submissions. Here you can see those tags in play:

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ApertureExpert Live Training Session 018 Export Available Now

PhotoJoseph's picture
April 20, 2012 - 8:55am

There wasn’t much notice, but the session went live today and it’s already online for download… check out Session 018, all about Export — everything you find in the Export menu, including Versions, Masters, Metadata and 3rd party plugins. Pretty important to know how to get the most out of export if you want the rest of the world to see your photography!

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Export

Live Training Session 018

This session covers everything you'll find in the Export menu, including Versions, Masters, Metadata and 3rd party plugins.

Duration: 00:48 hr
Included with membership
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Ten Tips to a Clean Aperture Library (1 of 10) — Find Your Files

Thomas Boyd's picture
April 12, 2012 - 12:00am

We just passed the 100th day of 2012 and I was looking at my Aperture library in Project view and realized I had exactly, you guessed it, 100 projects.

I’m no mathematician, but I’m pretty sure that’s averaging a project per day this year. Those 100 projects hold over 38,000 photos. In the past years I’ve averaged about 10,000 images per month and it looks like I’m on track for that number this year.

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How Many Photos Are in That Aperture Project, Album or Folder?

PhotoJoseph's picture
April 11, 2012 - 12:54am

Tiny tip for today, but it can be a helpful one if you aren’t aware of this.

In the Aperture preferences, you can enable an option to “Show numbers of versions for projects and albums”. You’ll find it under the Appearance tab.

“Show number of versions for projects and albums” option in Aperture’s preferences

This is a simple thing, but it means that when you’re looking at your Library list, you can immediately see how many photos are in each Project or Album. If you need 10 selected photos for a client or job or blog post or whatever, you can glance at that Album you’re adding photos into and see how many are there instantly. When looking for “that big collection of photos I shot at that thing but didn’t label properly”, seeing 300 photos in one and 2 in another is a pretty good indicator. When scanning your library for massive Projects that really should be broken up into more than one, or tiny projects that really should be merged (do I really need a project with 2 photos in it? No.), this is great info to have at a glance.

That image count can come in very handy

But notice that it does not give you an image count for a Folder. Why is that?

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