1: What Photo Stream does: it pushes images to ios enabled devices and to either Aperture or iphoto depending on which is enabled. I get that. I like that.

2: What does Photo Stream not do with Aperture? It does not allow ( as near as I can tell) normal import protocols which are native to Aperture. That is, you do not have the normal import panels on the right side of screen when importing normally in Aperture. That means you can't take advantage of your normal naming conventions and whatever fields you have populated in your presets–for importing. The kinds of things Joseph has presented in his various video tutorials and writings. It seems to me that if you want to keep your organization in tip top shape, Photo Stream gets in the way. That is, you have to organize and name and tag and keyword–manually after the Photo Stream Push. Not so good.

3: Faced with this, my inclination is to turn Photo Stream off.

4: But wait: what can be done?

Perhaps Apple itself could write code that permits something like the following.
1: Provide an option in APERTURE PREFERENCES that permits a choice of letting the images go to the year/month folder. OR lets the Aperture user choose “user preferences for imports”–with ability to set up given folders/projects for this purpose. Perhaps more importantly: naming convention.

2:Here is another way–PERHAPS BETTER: Write the code so that once the images have gone to the photo stream folder (or the year/month project/ not sure which would be better) click on import and bring up all the normal conventions when importing. Only besides your camera card, or desk top, or various hard drives, you would see PHOTO STREAM as an option from which to import. Then you could import normally with aperture presets you have created.

THIS SEEMS LIKE A FAIRLY EASY AND VERY USEFUL DESIGN IMPROVEMENT BY APPLE.

But if Apple refuses, perhaps there is another option. In November 2011, Morten Scheel wrote this on the Aperture Expert site:

“Hey guys.
I am currently working with Joseph to provide extra features to the Photo Stream via AppleScript. As of now I've written an app that runs in the background and detects when new images are downloaded from the stream. When a new photo arrives, it automatically selects and displays that image in Aperture.

Would any of you guys be interested in something like this? ******(Asterisks supplied by me.) A lot more is possible, including but not limited to copying photos to custom folders/projects, applying presets and such. I wrote the app for myself because I thought it would be cool to shoot a picture on my iPhone and have it automatically displayed in full screen in Aperture a few seconds later.

Anyway, let me know if you think this worth releasing as it is or if you have ideas for further improvements.”
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If Apple can't/ won't provide the code to use Aperture's native import tools with Photo Stream then I think it may be a good idea to encourage Morten to pursue his script.

If I am wrong in all of this: please indicate how to use Photo Stream and not forfeit Apertures native import/organization tools.

Thanks.