Tips

One of the reasons we shoot pictures is to share our memories. And in Aperture, it’s incredibly easy to share your photos in a variety of ways; one of the simplest is through email.

The most obvious way to email a picture is by selecting one or many photos, and clicking on the Email icon. That’s fine if you know exactly what you want to send before you click the button. But sometimes you want to add a few photos, then add a few more, then add a few more, then realize that you’ve added so many that the email has gotten huge and you really should send these smaller. Dang.

There is a way to handle this that’s very, very flexible.

Once your Aperture library crosses the 10,000 image mark, you will likely pause to wonder if you’re going to run out of space any time soon. You may have already looked at the size of the Aperture Library file in the Pictures folder, and thought “whoah… 150GB… so that’s why I’m outta space”. But wait, you’re working referenced; all those massive RAW files are on an external drive, how is this even possible?!

Previews. Aperture 1.5 introduced a series of amazing features that allowed you to carry around an enormous number of photos on a single computer, while at the same time leaving your RAW files on other drives, and still letting you share those photos throughout the OS. They way it handles this magic is through JPEG Previews and XML.

Understanding how this works will allow you to control the size of your library and relcaim 10’s – or even 100’s! – of GB’s back.

I’m very excited to announce that along with Frederick Van Johnson, host of TWiP (This Week in Photography podcast), we’ll be hosting the first TWiP Weekend Workshop to be held in Joshua Tree, CA!

I’m about to start on the last chapter in my new eBook, entirely titled “The ApertureExpert’s In-Depth Getting Started with Aperture 2 – a beginner’s guide”. Here’s the introduction…

Over many years of working with Aperture, and helping other people with Aperture, I’ve noticed one very common trend—no matter how much they love Aperture now, most people had a hard time getting started. This guide is designed to get you on your way. It doesn’t really matter too much where you’re coming from to use this guide; be it any other photo management application or none at all. This guide aims to get you moving efficiently, and possibly more importantly, to set the stage for a lot more learning. There are loads of free videos on apple.com that show you the basic of basics—I’m more interested in getting you started with a very solid understanding of what your choices are. So while some of the basic instructions like “Importing Your First Photos” takes up a seemingly bizarre six pages, after reading it you’ll truly understand what’s happening to your photos and what options you have.