Tips

Aperture offers a variety of way to tag your images, including ratings (one through five, plus ‘reject’), flagging, and color labels. This session explores these options and suggests where and when you might use each of them. This is one of those “you can do it your way” features, and understanding how they work will help you decide how to best integrate them into your own workflow.

After the previous two posts, if you’re a Photo Mechanic user, you may be considering switching by now. This post is all about how to make that happen—how to match your familiar Photo Mechanic rating system, keyboard shortcuts, and much more in Aperture. Before diving in and trying to figure it all out on your own, read this post and see just how familiar Aperture can feel to seasoned Photo Mechanic users.

Recently I interviewed Olympic photographer Jeff Cable about his Photo Mechanic based editing workflow. His perception, along with nearly every other photographer at the Olympics, was that Photo Mechanic is hands-down the fastest way to import your photos. While nearly everyone accepts that it’s quicker to use Aperture or Light Room to edit your selects, both have been shunned as importing too slowly. Aperture made massive improvements to import performance in 2012, and in many situations was even the speed champion. But as you’ll see in the following article and videos, in this massive-import, intense deadline situation, Aperture was being left behind. Or rather, it was… until now.