Tips

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!

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.

Aperture 3 is a 64-bit app, but many of the plug-ins aren’t yet updated to run in 64-bit. However, lucky lucky me, the SmugMug plug-in by David Holmes is! In fact it appears it was done 10 days ago. Thanks David!

Why does this matter? (More on 64-bit itself towards the end.)

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.