Tips

The ability to have multiple external editors in Aperture 3 is an oft-asked for feature, and hopefully it will come properly in a future release. What we really want is to ability to have a list of external editors to choose from, just like we have a list of plug-ins to choose from, right? But in the meantime, we need a work-around. Here’s one I’ve come up with. It’s not ideal, but with a little setup it can be relatively quick and painless to execute.

Basically, create a folder and fill it with aliases of all the applications you might want to configure Aperture to open in, make that folder easy to get to, and then when you need to switch, open the Preferences in Aperture, and the list of apps is only a click away.

Here’s a step-by-step…

Recently in the forums, a user asked about how to find the images in their library that they’d spent time working on already. (The reason in this case was to locate all images from a recent iPhoto conversion that they’d adjusted, so they could get rid of everything else and start over with a new strategy—but maintain the work they’d already done).

One of Aperture core strengths is its searching capabilities. You can search by just about anything in Aperture, and combine search criteria to perform exceedingly precise searches, and even save those as Smart Albums that will update in real-time as your library changes.

In this case, the search criteria is just one option away—Adjustments.

Aperture user John Thawley @JThawley has found a solution to his performance woes, and it involves deleteing not only a preference file, but certain caches as well.

I’ve been a long-time SmugMug user, and have always appreciated the quality of their service. The fact that I can sell prints to clients without having to do anything other than watch my bank account grow, and that when you send a question to their tech support, real people respond — and quickly — makes it a fantastic service. It’s not free, but as they say—you get what you pay for.

There are a couple of plug-ins for Aperture that allow you to upload to SmugMug directly, and I’ve always used ApertureToSmugMug, which was OK… bare-bones, but it worked. My frustration with SmugMug and the plug-in (and this hasn’t changed, as you’ll see in a moment) is that I have to make changes in several places to complete my gallery upload, before it’s ready to share with a client, my blog, or whatever.

SmuginProForAperture

Recently the author of SmuginProForAperture, Richard Laing, contacted me and asked if I’d have a look at his new plug-in. Regrettably I kept shoving the email to the bottom of my inbox, in one those “I know, I know… I will” continuous moments. Today though I needed to upload some images to SmugMug for a client and decided that was a great time to try out Richard’s new plug-in!

In fact, I liked it so much that it quickly earned the coveted Command-S keyboard shortcut in Aperture. Since there is no Save in Aperture, this is the closest thing to “saving” a photo I could think of! And it really is “saving” it, isn’t it… saving it to the cloud.