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Ten Tips to a Clean Aperture Library (1 of 10) — Find Your Files

Thomas Boyd's picture
April 12, 2012 - 12:00am

We just passed the 100th day of 2012 and I was looking at my Aperture library in Project view and realized I had exactly, you guessed it, 100 projects.

I’m no mathematician, but I’m pretty sure that’s averaging a project per day this year. Those 100 projects hold over 38,000 photos. In the past years I’ve averaged about 10,000 images per month and it looks like I’m on track for that number this year.

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How Many Photos Are in That Aperture Project, Album or Folder?

PhotoJoseph's picture
April 11, 2012 - 12:54am

Tiny tip for today, but it can be a helpful one if you aren’t aware of this.

In the Aperture preferences, you can enable an option to “Show numbers of versions for projects and albums”. You’ll find it under the Appearance tab.

“Show number of versions for projects and albums” option in Aperture’s preferences

This is a simple thing, but it means that when you’re looking at your Library list, you can immediately see how many photos are in each Project or Album. If you need 10 selected photos for a client or job or blog post or whatever, you can glance at that Album you’re adding photos into and see how many are there instantly. When looking for “that big collection of photos I shot at that thing but didn’t label properly”, seeing 300 photos in one and 2 in another is a pretty good indicator. When scanning your library for massive Projects that really should be broken up into more than one, or tiny projects that really should be merged (do I really need a project with 2 photos in it? No.), this is great info to have at a glance.

That image count can come in very handy

But notice that it does not give you an image count for a Folder. Why is that?

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A Neat Trick for Uploading Photos from Aperture

PhotoJoseph's picture
April 10, 2012 - 12:00am

[There’s an important update to this at the end… be sure to read all the way through, and to read the comments as well — particularly those by Butch Miller.]

Aperture has built-in support for flickr and Facebook, but sometimes that just doesn’t cut it for you. Or you may simply need to upload a photo to a service that isn’t built in; it doesn’t matter which, there are dozens (hundreds?) of places and reasons to push your photos.

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A Comparative Review of Snapseed and CameraBag 2

Thomas Boyd's picture
April 9, 2012 - 12:00am

With the recent addition of inexpensive photo enhancement apps Nik Software’s Snapseed [$19.99 on Mac App Store] and Nevercenter’s CameraBag 2 [$23.99 on Mac App Store] for Mac OS, we’ve been given quite a powerful set of creative tools. There’s been a good bit of excitement about both apps and Snapseed’s new feature allowing to be selected as an external editor for Aperture makes it even more attractive.

Before I continue, I have to explain my philosophy on post processing. I believe in a light touch. I’m a photojournalist and I could literally get fired for manipulating an image beyond the tolerance of my editors, which is closely aligned with the NPPA Digital Manipulation Code of Ethics

Not only do I proceed with a light touch to due to ethics, it’s also an aesthetic decision. My default preference is to see an image, and appreciate it for the content, light, color and composition. Too many times, I look at a photo with heavy manipulation and and only see the manipulation. The post-processing gets in the way of the photo. Too many times, heavy handed post-processing is intended to make a mediocre image better…and it never does.

Having said that, I do have fun experimenting with different presets, filters and apps that take a photo in a completely different directions. I mostly experiment with portraits and other non-newspaper work. Embarrassingly, I’ve spent hours messing about, sometimes only to abandon the whole idea and stay with the straight image. I don’t mind using my time experimenting because, when I finally decide to go with something, I feel good about it.

This is how I exported the image out of Aperture

Click through to see the comparisons and the rest of the article!

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