This is my first Blurb book using images several years old and still in an iPhoto library. I opened iPhoto in Aperture but found I could not use the Rotate function at all. I had to return to iPhoto to rotate images. Back in Aperture I selected 286 photos from iPhoto and saved them in an Album in Aperture with a number sequence at the beginning of the version name so they would stay in order. As Blurb deals directly with iPhoto I exported the album from iPhoto to Blurb only to find that all the images turned up in the wrong order when chosing order by filename….. nothing else like date was suitable. They were alphabetical by name without the number sequencing.
I then went back to Aperture and exported the Album with the numbered images as a new libary. It looked fine. I exported the folder by version name to the desktop. Then I imported these into Blurb. They were in the right order at last but a lot of them were rotated wrongly and some only showed small bits of the photo so had obviously had some zoom applied to them. I've never seen this before.
Does anyone know what's going on? The only thing I can do at the moment is to manually drag and drop each image from Aperture or iPhoto (the folders are the same) so I get the order right in Blurb. I just tried a few and strangely enough the file name is the old one assigned by the camera and ditched ages ago.
When is Blurb going to link Aperture directly?
Before doing a large project with Blurb, I’d suggest you do a small, inexpensive book. FWIW, Blurb’s quality has been spotty (see the Book Printing forum on their site).
Specific to your issue - it sounds like the issue is with Blurb and not Aperture. It sounds like the images aren’t being imported correctly by Blurb.
FWIW, I’ve had several books printed by Apple via Aperture, and the quality has been excellent.
Thanks for the comments. I’m waiting on the arrival of the book. Thomas, I created a new version to do editing in Aperture when I got that message about being externally edited in iPhoto. This worked well, but of course, when deleting the first version it also disappeared from albums and slideshows. I hope Apple fixes it. I really want to know how to choose the proper naming preset to get a number sequence when exporting? I added a number to the beginning of the version names but Blurb ignored this and used the original filenames from the camera. How does one change filenames? I don’t want to keep those from the camera and would rather the version name and the filename were the same.
Ruth Lathlean
Ruth,
If you want to edit a photo in Aperture and get the “iPhoto externally edited” message (or something like that), you can create a new version of the photo in Aperture and you can then edit it. You’ll then end up with two instances of the photo unless you delete the first one. (I think this may actually be a bug that Apple is working on. I commented on this problem in the Apple online discussion forum and got a request from Apple for a sample library with the issue. I sent it but never heard anything else. That was several months ago.)
When you export photos from Aperture to the hard drive to upload to Blurb via the web browser, make sure you use the correct presets in the Aperture export dialog. For example, use the JPEG-Original Size preset to get maximum quality. And then choose the proper naming preset to get the exported filenames to start with a number sequence. You can completely customize it to get what you need.
Thomas
I just ran across this excellent blog post by Matthew Plummer showing how to create custom books in Aperture that you can print to PDF-X format and upload to Blurb for printing.
Matthew Plummer: Blurb and Aperture’s Custom Book Layout Tool
What is magnificent about this is that you can use all the power of Aperture’s book tool to create any page layouts you desire, print the book to a PDF-X format file, upload the PDF file to Blurb, and have Blurb print your book.
Photographer | https://www.walterrowe.com | https://instagram.com/walter.rowe.photo