Tips

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.

I’ve been playing with Places a lot lately (one of my favorite new features; I can’t wait to get 13 years of digital photos onto my map!) and in doing so have been figuring out the fastest way to do that. Of course I don’t have geodata for all these old photos, so this means just using the Places feature to assign a general location (i.e. Santa Monica Pier) to groups of pictures.

If all the photos in a project are in one location, it’s really easy to do. But when you have a few different locations in one project, it can get a little trickier. I tried doing it in the metadata inspector (oops, you can’t do batch locations there), and dragging things on the map (but that can get tedious finding those spots), and finally realized that as you would expect, Apple’s made it really easy to do… you just have to click in the right place.

That’s a shock… the 17,000+ image Aperture 2 Library I’ve imported into a clean Aperture 3 Library was 21.27 GB originally (without Previews). It’s now only 16.65 GB. That’s a nice surprise! I’ve already run Faces on it (big mistake… running Faces on a concert series; hellloooo audience!!! Talk about a chore rejecting all those unknown people! LOL), and have upgrade about 2/3 of the Library to the new processing engine.