Tips

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.

One of the features I was hoping for the most in Aperture 3 was Faces. OK, I’ve probably said that already about most of the new features in Aperture 3, but come on… it’s a great upgrade!!

I’ve put the library update on hold so I could play with a few things in Aperture tonight. I created a new library and imported a few hundred iPhone photos. Perhaps not the easiest thing for Faces to deal with, since these are pretty low resolution and of dubious quality, but hey, it’s what was handy… and, they have GPS data for Places, too. Sweet.

A note: The following is a result of me writing this entry as I go. It’s NOT a cleaned-up, “how to use Faces” entry. So come along for the ride… maybe we’ll all learn a thing or two!

So with a whole 30 minutes to spare, I’ve finally begun my own move to Aperture 3. I took one of my client libraries and am starting with that. The fortunate thing of being forced to wait this week is I have the benefit of learning what has and hasn’t worked for other people. While this particular library is quite small (only 17,398 photos), I wanted to take the extreme-caution route. Here’s what I’m doing for this upgrade.

There have been reports of a few concerns with the upgrade process on this site, and while I may eventually get to respond to them individually, for the moment I wanted to share a very useful link on apple.com and some general tips on making this update as painless as possible.

First and foremost—make no mistake, this is a HUGE upgrade to your library. A lot has to happen for the library to be completely “version 3” ready. The library structure itself has changed, which is what allows you to do things like switch between libraries without relaunching. There’s a new RAW engine, so the images have to be re-processed by that (that can happen later though) before the new features like Curves and Brushes are available. The images all have to be processed for Faces (again, this can be deferred) and that in itself is incredibly labor intensive. The master files must be polled for EXIF data to look for GPS info, but that is pretty quick.

There’s an invaluable article on apple.com that you should read before upgrading if you have a large library—detailed explanations of what I’ve just stated above in there, clear as a bell.