Tips

I’ve been lusting after a new MacBook Air since they were released, but have been waiting to see what the reviews said for performance. After all, it’s (just) a Core 2 Duo processor, and even at the top-end, significantly lower specced than my 2.93Ghz 15” MacBook Pro from early 2009. But the hope of course was that with a more modern graphics card, the SSD “hard drive”, and some wishful thinking, that it could still stand up as an Aperture machine.

I ensure that all cameras — mine and my assistant’s — are perfectly synced immediately before a shoot so that I can edit them all chronologically later, without care to who shot what. That way when I’m sorting through photos of a critical moment (like the kiss at a wedding), I can step through image by image in perfect chronological order, regardless of who shot it or from what angle. This goes for multiple cameras that I may be carrying, and any other cameras under my control on the shoot. I find when compiling the best shots to tell a story, having all the photos in perfect order to be a tremendous timesaver (anyone who’s read any of my eBooks knows how much emphasis I put on having accurate and precise timestamps on my photos).

Separating my shots from their shots in Aperture 3

However if you’re on a job with an assistant/second shooter, such as a wedding, you may want to separate out their photos from yours at some point. Perhaps you want to see how many of their shots you ended up using (good way to judge how useful they were as a second shooter), or you simply want to take a critical eye to their work. Fortunately with Aperture, this is incredibly easy to do.

So many people on so many forums have been struggling for so many days on this Aperture to iLife sharing issue — some quite literally spending dozens of hours trying to solve the problem — that I thought I’d share how I personally handle this, and why this hasn’t affected me at all.

I don’t use the iLife Sharing. It’s not because I don’t like the idea—on the contrary, I think it’s brilliant. However I work with multiple computers, multiple libraries, and multiple devices. The sharing system works best if you have one Library, on one computer, use iLife on that one computer, and sync your iPad/iPod/etc to that one copy of iTunes, and so on. The system is beautiful in its simplicity.

My setup isn’t simple.

My Setup

I have an iMac that hosts my main Libraries. Even though I’ve now merged most Libraries, I do still have a couple client-specific ones that I don’t want to merge. So right there, we have a sharing problem—which library is shared? The answer is, the last one that was open. That might not always be the one you want to get to, though.

I also have a MacBook Pro that stores working Libraries as I travel. And I use the fantastic Project export feature from Aperture on the iMac to move projects over to my MacBook Pro so I can catch up on old projects while traveling (for example, I’m currently copying a managed 127GB Library across my network so I can catch up on a wedding edit and some other projects on the flights to Bangkok tomorrow). Point is, I have projects on that computer, too.

This is a topic that’s shown up here on this blog, on the flickr Aperture group as well as on the Apple boards, and it appears that, at least for one user, the source of the problem has been found.

The Problem

The problem has been people’s Aperture Libraries not showing up in iLife, Mail, etc—basically the Media Browser connection was broken. You can share your Aperture Library with the rest of your Mac by enabling Share previews with iLife and iWork in the Preferences: