The template code in Random_Wok.m comes with some placeholders and empty methods that need to be modified slightly. By pressing control / (forward slash) I can skip to the next placeholder. The first code it finds looks like this:

I have to replace that with YES or NO depending on what behavior I want. In this case I want NO because I will not be supplying a list of presets:

I return YES for -allowsMasterExport and -allowsVersionExport because initially I don't care about the file format or contents, just the file name. For -wantsFileNamingControls I return NO. I'm going to set the name myself. For -wantsDestinationPathPrompt I return YES, since I want the user to supply that. And because the user supplies that, -destinationPath can return nil.

I do need to return a value for -defaultDirectory. I'm going to return the user's Documents folder by putting this code in:


This method is called when the user clicks the Export button. So I just tell the export manager to start the export:


When the export manager is ready to start the export it calls the -exportManagerWillBeginExportToPath: method and provides the folder path. That folder path will need the file name appended later. So I make a copy of that path in an ivar that I create:

Since I will be exporting all the images, this method always returns YES:

Confirmation comes back that the image will be exported. I don't need to know this, so I ignore it:

This method returns NO because I want to pretend that the plug-in wrote the image data somewhere. Instead I will just log what it did:

I have to tell the export manager that the export is done if the user cancels or if the export completes:

And that is it for now. What this should do is to give me a dialog that lets me select the export preset and whether I want the master or the version exported. Then I should get a dialog to select a destination folder that defaults to me Documents folder. When I click Export it will do nothing except log the image indexes and file names.

I compile it and there are no errors. A miracle! Here is the bundle in the Random Wok/build/Release folder:

The other parts of this series can be found via the Cocoa page.

Tags: Aperture, Plug-ins, Cocoa, Random Wok

Adobe Lightroom is now final. Adobe is now selling Lightroom on their site for a special introductory price of $199 ($299 after April 30th). Availability is mid-February for the English version and late-February for the French version.

For some reason they are displaying the names of many (all?) of the beta participants. The other odd thing is that I could not find a logo for Lightroom. What happened to the branding? Or is it all Photoshop now?

Tags: Lightroom

Why write a plugin that assigns random file names? I can think of several reasons:

• It has not been done yet (always a good reason)
• There is no random file naming feature in Aperture, so it is creating new functionality
• Random file names for images posted to the web can be changed periodically. This prevents people from deep linking to them and using your bandwidth
• Random file names for images that are subsequently sorted in name order will have a random order. This is useful for creating a random image order for imports into other applications
• It removes all meaning from the file names and so makes them neutral
• The order of sequences can be hidden

On with the task. An Aperture plugin is a bundle: a folder that looks to the user like a single file. Inside that bundle goes the executable code, plus all the resources: interface elements, menus, images, strings, etc. A necessary part of the bundle is the info.plist file that contains basic information about the bundle itself.

The info.plist file in my project has already been partially set up by the XCode template. I have to edit some of what is provided: the CFBundleIdentifier string for instance.

There is a help URL that I can set that I will need to ensure is active on my site:

And there is a location that requires a UUID. That's a globally unique identifier. So I run that utility and it gives me a string:

That is it for the plist. I don't believe I have to do anything to the rest of the bundle at this stage, but next I will have to write some code to get some basic functionality out of my plugin.

The other parts of this series can be found via the Cocoa page.

Tags: Aperture, Plug-ins, Cocoa, Random Wok, info.plist

DepicT is a short film competition. Short here means ninety seconds or less. Above is one of the entries from 2003: How To Tell When A Relationship Is Over. You have until Monday September 3rd to send in entries for the 2007 competition.

Tags: Fun, Video, Interesting Stuff

I'm going to write an Aperture export plugin. Or rather I'm going to try to write an Aperture export plug-in -- we'll see how far I get before either getting totally stuck or running out of time and patience. The purpose of my plugin is to provide randomness to exported images. Initially it will write images to a folder that the user selects and give them random file names. It will be called Random Wok.

Since I have XCode 2.4.1 already installed, the first thing I have to do is to get the Software Developer Kit for Aperture 1.5.1. That is downloaded from Apple's developer web site. Once logged in it is found under Applications in the Downloads area. Since I'm an ADC member (a free, cheap Online member) I have a log-in and can access the disk image that I need. Sign up to be a member if you are not already. Doing so will subject you to a NDA, so beware. I certainly won't be giving any secrets away in writing about my attempts. Note that the documentation for the Aperture Export SDK is publicly available.

Once I have the SDK disk image I open it and install it and copy the documentation to a folder on my hard drive. The Read Me contains instructions on how to integrate the documentation into the XCode documentation viewer. It is worth following those instructions because it makes accessing it very easy.

The SDK installs a template that can be used as a starting point for writing a plugin. Creating a new project in XCode allows me to select the plug-in template:

I give it the name Random Wok and my project is created:

Random_wok.m is where most of my code will live.

I have limited tools to work with. The template contains some starter code, and the installation of the SDK installed an example plugin called SampleFTPExportPlugin. And there is the documentation, and that is it.

My understanding of the way this plugin works and what I need to do is also limited. I know that I have to set up some data in the info.plist file to describe my plugin, create and edit any interface elements I need with Interface Builder, and manage the plugin interface. As far as I can tell, the way the plugin works is that my interface is presented to the user and then everything is event-driven based on what the user clicks and what Aperture gives me. The plugin can either have Aperture write images to files or can handle the image data itself. I have to at least partially understand the dance that is required between Aperture and the plugin.

I also have to set up a number of methods so that Aperture knows what to do with my plugin. For instance -(BOOL)allowsMasterExport returns either YES or NO depending on what my plugin is capable of. The first thing to do is to fill in enough to make it compile and do roughly what I want and sprinkle some NSLog() function calls around so I can see what is happening.

The other parts of this series can be found via the Cocoa page.

Tags: Aperture, Plug-ins, Cocoa, Random Wok

The Joy Of Tech demonstrates the tyranny of choice on their comics page.

Tags: Fun, Microsoft, Pigs With Lipstick

ApertureToGallery is an Aperture export plugin that takes images from Aperture and puts them into galleries created with Gallery. The latest version (0.98.4) is free and adds compatibility with the most recent release of Gallery2.

Tags: Aperture, Plug-ins, Interesting Stuff

Scott Stevenson has gone to great lengths to post an introductory article on learning Cocoa. He describes it thus:


Send Scott money if you like what you see and he will spend more time on this endeavor. The message of this tutorial is that Cocoa is a very powerful tool. I'm interested to see what is next.

Tags: Cocoa, Learning, Interesting Stuff

Here is how to find your Aperture library if you don't know where it is.

Launch Aperture and open the application preferences under the Aperture menu (or hit command comma). At the top of the window the current library location can be seen and changed:

The ~ character (tilde) means my home folder.

There is also a quick way to find all of your Aperture libraries on any or all of your disks. Open a Finder window -- any one will do. Then press command F. That turns the Finder window into a Find window (confusing but true):

Now select Computer or Home, or appropriate disks (via Others) using the buttons just below the toolbar. That will limit the search to whatever is chosen. Then delete the Last Opened entry by clicking the - button on the right end of the line. All you need for this is one line that starts with Kind, so if there are others, get rid of them too, and change the remaining one to Kind.

On the pop-up to the right of Kind, select Others... and type Library into the box. Instantly you will get a list of all the libraries:

This will find all sorts of libraries, not just Aperture libraries, but you can easily scroll through to find what you are looking for.

The TextWrangler and Preview icons are on my toolbar because I dragged the application icons there. It's a little-known feature that you can put almost anything in the toolbar and it will appear on all the Finder windows for easy access -- either for clicking or for dropping things onto. The only thing I don't recommend adding is servers and other volumes that may go off line. That can hang the Finder.

Tags: Aperture, Library

Regular (cheap, non-paying) ADC members like me can now download and watch one of the presentations given at WWDC last year. It's 500MB H.264, 1 hour 32 minutes. You'll need an ADC login to download it via iTunes.

Tags: WWDC, Interesting Stuff

Brand Autopsy is a blog created by John Moore for his marketing practice. He treats the company marketing department as a patient, offering services to diagnose and treat common illnesses and ailments. The blog features Whole Foods and Starbucks Coffee more than you would expect, but that is because he cut his teeth working in the marketing departments of these two very successful companies.

There is a lot of interesting material here: the importance of people (they are very hard to copy), leadership, customers, book reviews, even an unboxing of the Wall Street Journal.

Tags: Site Focus, Branding

Kotaku has an article that describes the decline of the grey market for Playstation 3 game consoles. Once considered a smash hit product with insatiable customers, reality has set in. The demand is not there and prices have fallen as a result. There is an entire business segment that makes its living from buying game consoles at retail in anticipation of money-no-object buyers who crave the latest gadget. But not this time: it became obvious very quickly that the PS3 is not going to live up to its hype and the potential buyers vanished.

I predict that the next big money maker in this segment is going to be not the consoles themselves, but futures and option contracts for the consoles. Then things can go the way of tulip bulbs in the 17th century.

Tags: Pigs With Lipstick, Consoles

Here is a problem that I ran into a while back. Exporting anamorphic (16:9) movies from Final Cut Express HD to iDVD does not work: iDVD does not know that they are anamorphic and so displays them as 4:3 movies, stretching them vertically. This problem does not occur with the Canon S3 video AVI format because the pixels are square -- nothing is stretched for display.

However for DV shot in anamorphic mode, as I do for all my movies shot with a regular DV video camera, this is a problem. The solution is to export the video as a reference Quicktime move from Final Cut Express HD with all the markers exactly as you would normally do, and then run Anamorphicizer on it. This utility sets a flag in the exported movie that is recognized by iDVD. iDVD then does the right thing and the move is burned to DVD with the correct aspect ratio settings. [Update: as was pointed out by a reader, you need Quicktime Pro to do this].

The movie exported from Final Cut Express HD will usually be a reference movie. Here is mine:

It shows up in the Finder with this information:

To get Anamorphiciser to process it, I drag and drop the icon onto the Anamorphicizer icon. Anamorphicizer will open the movie and display color bars for a short time, then display a dialog:

The movie will be opened at the first frame and the name changed to Shell.mov. I click OK to dismiss the dialog box and then from the menu bar, select File > Save As... The dialog displayed is a little odd:

The folder it shows is called Resources and it already contains some items don't look like anything I have created. This happens because the utility is actually showing me the Resources folder inside the application. I don't want to save my movie here! So I change the folder to a more sensible location, give the movie a name that indicates that it is wide now, and set the selection to save as a reference movie:

Hit Save and I am done. The icon has changed to a Quicktime icon:

But that makes no difference to iDVD. Drag that onto iDVD.

You can download Anamorphicizer from this page. There are two versions: one for Quicktime previous to 7 and one for Quicktime 7.

Tags: Final Cut, Anamorphic, 16:9, iDVD, Quicktime, Importing, Tips And Tricks

Merging Aperture projects is something that I very rarely do. Aperture projects represent the way that images were acquired, and it is unusual for two separate projects to have the same circumstances and therefore belong together.

But here is an example of merging that does make sense: two people shoot the same event at the same time and later each imports their own images into a separate Aperture project to do some initial rating and tagging. Once that is complete, these images could all be merged into a single project (for the event). Now in the same project, stacks can be built from images of a single subject taken simultaneously but from different viewpoints. As separate projects stacks could not be built this way because Aperture requires that all images in a stack come from the same project.

Another advantage of combining projects is that since projects can be exported, this creates a single archivable collection of images, ratings, and metadata.

I will merge these two projects Home and Garden into a single project called Home and Garden:

I select Home, ensure that all the images are visible by clicking on the X in the filter, and select all the images with command A. Then I just drag and drop those images into the Garden project:

That moves the master files into the Garden project if they are managed. If they are referenced, then they stay where they are, but the references to them are moved. Finally I double click Garden to rename it to Home and Garden and delete the now empty Home project. There should be no warning when I delete the Home project: it is empty. If for some reason it is not empty, then this dialog will appear:

And I have to cancel and figure out why images are left in the project before proceeding.

Any albums, galleries, light tables, or smart albums that reference images in the merged projects are not affected by the merge, as would be expected.

There are alternatives to merging projects. Putting the projects into a common blue folder is almost as good as merging the projects. If the blue folder is selected thee bowser will show the contents of the projects intermingled. Blue folders can be nested and so allow a whole hierarchy of projects and project groups to be filtered and browsed. This allows the projects themselves to be small and fast, while the scope of browsing is wide. Filtering works as expected too. Here I have several projects in blue folders and also blue folders in blue folders:

But using a common blue folder has one significant disadvantage: stacking will not work if an attempt is made to include images from more than one project.

Creating an album that contains the sum of the images in a number projects achieves many of the same goals as having a single merged project. It also allows images to be manually discarded without resorting to rating, deleting, or filtering. This allows you to weed out every frame that contains the one guest that everyone would prefer to forget without adding complex keywording. An album of this sort can be located anywhere in the library, inside or outside of any project or blue folder.

Another way of grouping the images from many projects is through a smart album. If all of the images in the two projects share a common keyword or other metadata, then that can be used to find all the images in both projects and a smart album created to recreate the set at any time.

Keeping projects separate can be useful for exporting images or using referenced masters. The dialogs for these actions include the ability to define a folder organization and using the project name is one of the selectable elements:

So in the example used at the beginning, having a separate project for each shooter would allow the images for the whole event to be exported into two folders, one per shooter, together with a different folder structure above and below those folders.

Another potential problem with merging projects is that it can make archiving and moving them difficult simply because of their size.

Tags: Aperture, Projects, Merging

O'Reilly Digital Media has posted two more Inside Aperture podcasts. Number 6 features Richard Kerris talking about plug-in development. Number 7 has Derrick Story and Scott Bourne explaining select, compare, and rating tools at Macworld 2007.

Tags: Aperture, Podcast

While I use Aperture, I often come across things that are not quite right, things that are plainly wrong, things that could be done better another way, and things that are missing. When this happens I go to the Aperture menu and select Provide Aperture Feedback. That takes me to Apple's Aperture Feedback page where I fill in all the details. When I say "when this happens" I mean literally right then while the thought is still fresh in my mind I go to the feedback page and start typing.

Actually I don't fill in all the details. I filled in every field the first time I visited, but thereafter just the important five:

The name, email address, and subject auto-fill using Safari, so that saves some typing. I select the feedback type in the pop-up and the fill in the subject and comments. For the subject I try to be terse but accurate:


I use the same structure for all of my feedback comments: summary, problem, solution/suggestion, value. Here is an example. I don't actually title the sections:


Another thing that I do is to try to use the correct terminology for the things I am referring to. The Window menu calls it the Control Bar, so that must be what it is called.

It can be useful to Apple if you let them know which version of the application you are using, especially if you are reporting a bug:

Apple does read these things and they do take note of them. I have seen several obscure bugs that I reported corrected in Aperture updates. Who knows, maybe they will incorporate some of my suggestions and ideas in later versions. Even if they don't, at least they will be able to pool my feedback with those of others and understand what the problems are.

If you click the Submit Feedback button at the bottom of the page and nothing happens, then don't give up. Scroll back up and look for the red text:

Who is going to be first to suggest that the feedback page could use some improvement? When you are done: you'll get a thank you:

Tags: Aperture, Apple, Feedback

It is possible to create new Aperture projects quickly and without taking your hands off the keyboard:

• Select an existing project that is inside the library or blue folder where you want the new projects to be
• Press command N
• Type the name of the new project
• Don't hit return or click anywhere: just hit command N again and repeat for the next project

Tags: Aperture, Tips And Tricks, Projects

Last night at about 8pm I thought I heard fire crackers outside. So I peered out of the window, and saw what looked like fireworks going up into the sky. When I went outside to investigate and looked over the neighbor's fence I saw flames coming out of the upstairs bedroom of a house two doors down at the back. After calling 911 I went back out, saw that the fire department was there and started talking pictures with my Canon S3. I added 18 pictures to the Canon S3 gallery (click forward to the fourth page). As far as I know the house was empty at the time.

Tags: Fire, Canon, S3, Interesting Stuff

An Atlas Of The Universe is just that. You can start at 14 billion light years radius and zoom in all the way to the stars that are closest to our own within "only" 12.5 light years (about 73 million million miles).

Tags: Universe, Atlas, Big, Interesting Stuff

Sometimes I want to split an Aperture project into two or more smaller projects. It's pretty rare though, since my projects are simply time-based (one a month) due to the relatively small number of photos I take. Also my picture taking is incidental to the other things I do: there are no clients, locations, models, or weddings for me.

For others this may not be the case and project splitting may be a more regular activity. For instance, after a day in the field with five CF cards and two people, the images associated with similar activities during the day will be split across cards. It's probably a good idea to dump all of the cards into one project and then split the images into several projects by client, shooter, location, or other category that ties them to their acquisition.

Splitting an Aperture project into two or more projects is as simple as dragging thumbnails. Here is a small example project called Home and Garden with 13 images:

And here are the images:

I'll split it into two: one project called Home, and the other called Garden. It is not possible to create a new project from a selection as can be done with albums, so I have to create a new empty project and fill it. Pressing command N with the Home and Garden project selected gives me a new empty project that I can rename:

Then I double click and rename the original project to have the two projects I want:

To move the images I select the project I want to move from, make the selection (manually in this case, but a filter will work too), and drag them to the project I want to move them to:

I wait a little while for the move to complete, and I now have two projects with the original images split between them. (If I had held Option down as I dragged the cursor would have gotten a green plus sign and the move would have become a copy operation)

If it makes sense, I can group these two projects into a blue folder. This will let me filter both of the projects at the same time, selecting all the images in both projects by day or keyword, for instance. To create the blue folder I select the enclosing folder (or the library if I am at the top level) and hit shift command N:

I name the folder Home and Garden, and then drag the two projects into the folder where they are automatically put into alphabetical order:

I can see all of the images in two ways. Either I click on Garden and then option click on Home to get two browsers:

Or I click on Home and Garden folder and get them all in one place:

When a project is split, the import sessions are split as well. Both the Home and the Garden projects have the same two import sessions in my case because I moved photos that were in both. This allows the images to retain information about their source.

Another thing that happens when projects are split is that all the albums that reference the images are adjusted to suit. It doesn't matter where the albums are located: they can be in the project just split or anywhere in the library. One way to organize albums affected by project splits is to give them their own folder to live in:

Selecting the Albums folder does not display the contents of the albums, however.

But before splitting a folder, ask yourself some questions first. The idea of projects in Aperture is to represent the circumstances in which the images were acquired. This is a separate system from the actual file storage (referenced masters do that) and from the image presentation (taken care of by albums, metadata, and filters). Am I splitting because I want to use the new organization to get images out? (don't -- use albums or metadata). Or am I splitting because I want to better represent how the images were acquired (do).

Tags: Aperture, Splitting, Projects

I visited Macworld 2007 today. It was very busy all day. I took these pictures with my Canon S3 set to ISO 200 since the light was pretty low.

Many people sat to watch demonstrations of the features of Leopard, the iPhone, Apple TV, and others:

Here are some new Mail features:

Apple TV was on display:

Apple TV is much like Front Row but outputs to your TV instead of the computer screen. It can be synced like an iPod. So another way of thinking of it is as a high definition video iPod with wireless streaming added. The unit has a fat rubber base that does not slip and cannot scratch anything. It gets quite warm during use.

Aperture training was popular:

There were about thirty 24" iMacs set up for the attendees to play with and follow the demo. This is the same model that I use for Aperture. Lightroom was also popular.

The iPhone was displayed like the Hope diamond, with security and plexiglass:


Getting close up pictures was tricky, but possible:



It is smaller than you think it should be and very rounded:

The screen is extremely sharp and crisp. I could read the smallest text. At 160 pixels per inch it is about twice the linear resolution of a regular computer display.

Tags: Macworld, Photography, Canon, S3, Apple TV, iPhone, Aperture, Apple

I get quite a few people visiting this site either looking for photos of the moon, or trying to find out how to take pictures of the moon with the Canon S3.

Here is a 100% crop of one I took yesterday. It's unadjusted, so the image is fuzzy and the colors are wrong:

It was taken at 1/200 f4.5 hand-held at 12x zoom. I took three pictures and all of them turned out good.

The trick to getting a good moon photo with the S3 is to select spot metering. Access the metering choices via the FUNC menu and select Spot. If you turn the camera off and on again it resets to Evaluative, so there is no need to change the setting back.

Set the mode to Aperture priority (Av) and try f4.5 as a first choice (that's the sharpest). Point the camera at the moon and zoom in to 12x. If you can't hold it steady, use a bigger aperture or a tripod.

Here is the same photo after some adjustment in Aperture:

I increased the exposure and the contrast a little, added some highlight control, changed the white balance, and added edge sharpening.

Tags: Photography, Moon, Canon, S3, Aperture

For no particular reason, I have five packets of poppy seeds to give away at Macworld when I visit on Thursday. I'll be giving one packet to each of the first five people (or groups of people) who tell me that they read my blog.

The challenge -- and this is what makes it an even field -- is that none of you know what I look like.

[Update: I escaped without detection]

Tags: Macworld, Poppy Seeds, Crazy Ideas

EETimes has another great article that shows in detail why the home market is so important to Apple. Entitled The Top Ten Hang-ups in Home Networking, it catalogs the problems of interoperability, multiple standards, DRM, customer confusion, and leadership void that makes connecting anything to anything difficult or impossible. But the opportunity is huge:

A few data points provide a snapshot of the opportunities. Market watcher iSuppli Corp. (El Segundo, Calif.) predicts shipments of products with integrated wired home networking will rise by more than a factor of 10 in the next four years, to hit 223.8 million units in 2010. Parks Associates estimates the number of North American homes with networked digital-video recorders more than tripled from 400,000 in 2005 to 1.7 million by the end of 2006.

They state the problem very clearly:

But there are no easy pickings in this gold rush. Engineers face historic levels of complexity building the digital home for several reasons. An unprecedented number of players are competing for a piece of the action. Coordination between these would-be architects is minimal.

and give the consequences:

"The glue that holds all this together is home networking, and it stinks," said Van Baker, a consumer analyst with Gartner Dataquest, in an early 2006 story. "If home networking stays like it is, it will stall at 30 percent penetration," he said.

The home network is wide open for any player that can simplify, market, and deliver. Whoever achieves significant penetration will either drag the other players along, or push them to the side. Clearly iTV is part of this, but I expect there to be more.

Apple will start with the TV, get a toehold, and place themselves in a position to enable other players to do business through them, so creating an ecosystem. Think low-price downloadable games, YouTube videos, iChat, networked security cameras, and things like that. Make it compatible and it will just work on any Apple home system.

Tags: Apple, Apple TV, Networking, Interesting Stuff

I have two [Update: three] predictions for Macworld 2007: one hardware and one software [and one squishyware] . I haven't seen anything close to these, so I'm either uniquely right or just as wrong as everyone else. [Post-keynote update: I scored zero out of three. However I hope I may simply be premature rather than plain wrong. There are plenty more announcements still to come before June since the Keynote concentrated on only two products, and the Beatles' music was conspicuous. You can also see how I did on the iPhone here]

Storage That Works
The hardware surprise is that Apple will show a home storage and streaming appliance. Specifically it will:

• House up to six drives
• Take the exact same drive modules as the MacPro
• Have dual Gigabit Ethernet with Jumbo packet support and port trunking
• Have eSATA at 3Gbps, Firewire at 800 Mbps, and 802.11n wireless
• Support RAID and allow for incremental upgrades without downtime
• Have a built-in router
• Do back ups automatically in the background

Why? And who would want one?

The target market is the sub-SAN, sub-XServe content creation crowd, plus home power users. With six drives, the amount of storage is enormous and several RAID configurations are possible. It would be great with Aperture, Final Cut, or as a home streaming server for movies and music. The dual trunked Ethernet will allow direct connection to MacPros at maximum speed. With suitable switches it will work through a network as well. 802.11n wireless will let it stream to iTV with ease.

You can put it underneath the iTV and connect it with Ethernet, using the wireless to communicate with the rest of the world, or put it in a closet and use it wirelessly to the iTV, or put it next to a Mac and run it as a local storage box through Ethernet or eSATA or Firewire 800 and use it wirelessly at the same time. The built-in router allows you to wall off parts of the functionality among the network connections while still passing specific traffic.

Software That Sees
On the software side, the surprise will be Quicktime. Apple will show real-time facial recognition and object tracking and Steve Jobs will have even more fun showing it off than he did Photo Booth. It will let software treat scenes intelligently, allow iChat to know how many people are present, make games possible that use gestures, etc. You will have to wait for Leopard to get it though.

[Update: Final thoughts. I reckon that Paul McCartney and the remains of the Beatles will be there and will be providing some musical diversions]

What do you think? Any chance I am right?

Tags: Macworld, Apple, Server, Wild Guesses

Now that all of my old images and their metadata have been prepared and transferred from iView to Aperture, one step remains: clean up. Cleaning up comprises applying ratings, merging keywords, and converting data in other fields to keywords.

Before describing this process, some advice on performance. I discovered that by doing the right thing I could speed up some operations with Aperture up by a factor of more than a thousand. Yes really. The key advice is this:

If at all possible, don't have any images or thumbnails visible when you change metadata!

I found that doing some things like changing and editing keywords in the keyword HUD with a filter active that used that metadata took an hour rather than a second (I have 20,000 images in my library). Aperture was going through serious contortions with SQL and string handling during this time and eating real memory at a rate of about 50k a second (a memory leak?). Once I figured what was going on, I created an empty project and selected that each time I wanted to make changes to the keyword hierarchy.

Of course it is not always possible to have images not showing or filtered, but whenever messing with keywords, it is worth remembering.

Apply Ratings
To apply ratings (these were brought over as keywords from iView) I filter on the blue folder called iView that contains all of my projects with the imported images. Since all of my one star images have the keyword onestar, I filter on onestar, select all the images in the browser with command A and press the + key to give them a rating of one star. This takes a while because there are many one star images. Then (bearing in mind the performance tip above) I delete the onestar keyword from the Imported Keyword section of the keyword HUD.

I repeat this for the twostar and threestar keywords and the ratings are now done.

Convert People Keywords
Next I convert my people keywords. I have imported name keywords from iView that all start with a lower-case letter so I can distinguish them from the existing ones. To convert these is easy. After selecting my empty project and unlocking the keyword HUD I double-click on "steve" in the keyword list and change it to "Steve". That elicits this warning:

Once done, I drag the Steve keyword onto its containing keyword in my "master" hierarchy. In this case that keyword is Family under People:

I get another warning and then this warning:

Accepting the offer to merge the keywords leaves my imported images with the same keyword as those already in my library and ensures that they have the same hierarchy too.

I repeat this for each person until I am done.

Convert All Other Metadata
There is still more metadata to convert. Annoture maps iView metadata fields to IPTC fields. For instance Location in iView becomes Sub-location in Aperture. So I have to work through each IPTC field, identify all the possible values, filter by each of those values, select the images, and add or apply keywords appropriately.

This is not as hard as it seems. By adding the appropriate fields to the List - Expanded metadata view and browsing my images in list view I can sort them by these fields:


For Albuquerque I create a new keyword United States > New Mexico > Albuquerque, select all of the images with Albuquerque in the Sub-location field (in the list view with click at the top and shift click at the bottom of the range), and then apply the new Albuquerque keyword. See Metadata Views for more information on setting this display up.

Once I have worked all the way down the Sub-location column and repeated this for each different word used in that field I can clear the field. The easiest way to do this is to select all of the images I have imported (and processed), press shift command B to bring up the batch change dialog and set it up like this:

By selecting Replace and checking the box next to Sub-location I choose to clear that field on all selected images. I press OK and then move to the next field.

Delete The Old Folder Hierarchy
Finally I am done, and all that remains is to delete my old folder hierarchy. It is now empty of course. I left it in place because in the second step (importing) iView still needs the hierarchy in place to allow filtering by folder. Now it is no longer needed.

That's It
I am sure that others will have a different story to tell about moving from iView to Aperture. Please let me know your own experience so I can improve this article.

Tags: Aperture, iView, Workflow, Keywords

One problem with keeping referenced masters on removable media such as DVDs or Firewire drives is knowing what is actually on them. Mounting the disk or drive brings the masters on line and the badges change from this:

to this:

But it is difficult to see just these images among the thousands and register which ones are on the drive that just mounted.

An email from Johan Elzenga suggested an easy way to see just the referenced images that are on the mounted drive: use a pair of smart albums. This first one finds all offline images. It is set up to work only on images for my 2006-05 project:

The File status setting is found in the action (cog) menu on the top right.

Its sibling shows all masters that are referenced and online. Since managed masters are always online, the Match setting at the top is set to All and two conditions are needed:

This makes the album only show masters that are online and referenced and in the 2006-05 project. And with either of these I can also use additional filtering, searching, and sorting in the browser window where the images are displayed to narrow my choice further.

The neat thing about these smart albums is that they will change their contents as disks are mounted and removed. Put in a DVD, watch the album. Eject it and put an another. Repeat.

Tags: Aperture, Smart Albums, Referenced, Managed, Masters, Online, Offline

Junko Yoshida, writing for EETimes is an interesting test case for HDTV. She is far from an average buyer:

I've been talking and writing about high-definition TV since I first saw Japan's HDTV demonstration--not in digital, but in analog--more than 20 years ago. My colleagues and I have chronicled for this newspaper all the trials and turbulence behind the development of U.S. digital HDTV technologies, including the advent of an underlying video compression technology that enabled the transmission of digital TV signals, the byzantine politics of TV spectrum and 1,080-interlaced vs. 720-progressive-scan resolution formats that pitted consumer electronics manufacturers against the PC industry. In short, I know this stuff inside out. Or so I thought.

Yet having bought all the equipment and hooked it up, it doesn't work correctly and nobody can fix it:

I ended up calling our retailer (Best Buy), which diverted me to the display manufacturer (Sharp), which called up a subdivision at a different location in order to find a repair guy in our neighborhood--where a high-tech glitch slowed things down. The repair shop's fax machine was broken. So I had to call the repair guy myself, and got to tell the whole story all over again. They said nobody could come until after Christmas.

Apple could have a huge hit in this space simply by making a system that works when you put it together.

[Update: I have added a lot of material in the comments in response to a reader]

Tags: HDTV, Pigs With Lipstick, Interesting Stuff

Les Posen gives a personal account of the Macworld keynote given by Steve Jobs in 2003. After the anti-climax of 2002, the 2003 keynote was preceded with a teaser marketing campaign and showed us iLife, Safari, the 17" Powerbook, and more. You can see it on YouTube.

Tags: Macworld, Keynote

Instead of using Photoshop or other complex tools to make watermarks I use TextEdit and some simple techniques. I don't get text with transparency this way: everything created will have a background of some sort, but it is quick and effective (and free).

First I launch TextEdit and type in the text I want, centered if that is the effect I am after:

Then I select all the text and press command T to bring up the fonts panel:

and play around until I get what I want:

That is Snell Roundhand 36 pt. Very nice. I can also use the character palette to find other special characters and decorations. To get the character palette, turn it on in the International Preference Pane:

and click the checkbox at the bottom that displays it in the menu bar:

And then select it from the menu bar. I pick the character I want:

and press Insert to get the character into my document:

Now it looks the way I want it, I need to save it and take a snapshot of it by pressing command shift 4 and dragging a rectangle around the text like this:

That gives me a file called Picture 1.png on my desktop. That is the snapshot.

To set up this image as a watermark, I select an image and go File > Export > Export Versions and select Edit... from the Export Preset pop-up menu:

Then I create a new preset with the + button:

or select an existing preset. Then I drag the image file from the desktop into the watermark drop box:

To turn it on, I check the Show Watermark checkbox, I pick the location, and set the opacity to get the right look:

Scaling the watermark will apply it before the image is resized for export, resulting in a small watermark if a large scaling is used. Not scaling will keep the watermark the full size.

Clicking OK to close and Export to do the export I get my watermarked image:

For a different effect this can be inverted or have different colors. I go back to the TextEdit document, select the text and go File > Text > Table... to create a table that includes the text in a cell. Changing the table Rows and Columns counts to 1 and 1, gets me this:

It does not look very different, but since the text is now inside a table, I can change the text and the table cell background colors (and the cell border). I select the text and hit command shift C, then pick white from the Colors panel. Then I set the cell border to 0 px and select Color Fill for the table cell background:

Now I click on the color patch on the right and pick black from the Colors panel. The result is white on black which I can take a snapshot of as before:

And here is the final result with the transparency turned way down:

It would be a great addition to the watermark features if Aperture had a way of selecting a color range as being transparent and had the ability to invert the image it is given.

Tags: Aperture, Watermarking, TextEdit

EETimes is reporting on the change in focus of the 801.11n wireless networking standard to home video. 802.11n is a high-speed, multi-channel version of the current WiFi standards, 802.11a, b, and g. All the current Macs have the hardware built in: it's just not enabled with drivers yet.

Broadcom Corp. and Atheros Communications Inc. raised eyebrows last January when they offered "draft" silicon for 802.11n, even though by year's end the IEEE working group had yet to finalize this standard. Almost as surprising as the early silicon for 802.11n was the fact that they emphasized consumer, rather than enterprise, applications on their Web sites.

No doubt driven by at least one huge customer knocking at their door: Apple with iTV and other products. Eventually Apple will set the standard protocol for wireless video delivery and then sell iTV to the display makers in an embedded form (how else will they differentiate themselves?). Like the connector on the iPod the wireless "connection" will be the key compatibility item that locks the competition out.

Tags: Video, Networking, Interesting Stuff

Annoture, the application I have been using to transfer keywords and other metadata from iView to Aperture, has been updated to 1.0.2. The new version improves name matching and adds date matching. Annoture is $15 shareware. Although I don't use the feature, Annoture provides two-way syncing of metadata between the two applications.

Tags: Aperture, Annoture, Keywords

Following preparation, the next step in moving my old photos from iView to Aperture is importing. There are two things to import: the images and the metadata.

Import Images
At the end of this process my Aperture library will contain managed images. But initially I import all of them by reference into the projects I prepared. The reason for this will become clear. I import entire folder hierarchies at once by using File > Import > Folders Into A Project. This puts all of the images from the folder hierarchy into a project and creates a hierarchy of brown folders and albums that matches the folder organization. In this way I still have my old hierarchy represented but can archive it without manual blue folder work and lots of separate imports. Of course I can throw away the albums if I wish: I may not want to have any remnants of my old folder structure remain in Aperture.

When importing I use a rename setting called Version Dash Date. That takes the version name and adds the image date. I leave the images in their current location. So on the import dialog, the settings look like this:

I don't have to wait for the imports to complete. Aperture will queue imports and automatically go through all of the ones I have set up:

Then when my imports are all complete, I wait for all the thumbnails to build -- just to be sure nothing odd happens -- and check the projects over to make sure they look right.

All of the images so for imported have been referenced, but the next step changes that. For each project in the blue folder I created (called iView) I consolidate the masters with the Move option selected. File > Consolidate Masters for Project brings up this dialog that confirms my selection:

This step moves the referenced masters into my Aperture library, so leaving the original folders empty. But are they empty? If they are not then there has been a problem and I need to go sort it out. Possible reasons for the folders not being empty include bad image files, images files in formats that Aperture will not import, text and other foreign files, and permissions problems.

Any easy way to do this check is to display the top-level folder in list view in the Finder, select everything with command A, and then press option command right-arrow. That opens all the folders recursively and shows their contents. Close them all up again with option command left-arrow.

I deal with anything that has not been consolidated, and get all the remaining images into the library or trash them if they are corrupt.

Once consolidated, I mark all the images with a new keyword notreviewed using the keyword HUD. I'm not sure I will need it, but this is the last opportunity to have a way of automatically tying together all of the images I have removed from my old folder structure.

Import Metadata
Now I break out Annoture. The version I am using is 1.0.2. Annoture processes all of the metadata for the images in a project by scanning the iView catalog for the file names of those images, retrieving the metadata, and adding it to the Aperture database.

Here are the preferences I use for Annoture:

By ignoring file extensions I can have Annoture copy metadata from old files that had no extension but were corrected to have an extension before they were added to Aperture. Comparing capture dates allows images in the iView catalog that have the same name to be distinguished. Without that metadata from the first image found rather than the correct image will be transferred.

I set up the main window like this:

Each time I run Annoture I select the appropriate project in the pop-up. I have to make sure that all of my projects have different names, because it is not possible to distinguish identically-named projects here.

Important: Annoture transfers metadata for each image in the selected Aperture project by examining the current selection displayed by iView. It is important to know this, because if I have a subset of my thumbnails displayed in iView when I run Annoture two things will happen: 1) it will run faster because it has fewer images to scan, and 2) there will be some images that do not have their metadata transferred.

I can use this behavior to my advantage. Since my old images are organized into folders by year or month, I set up the Aperture projects that way. By filtering the iView display by using the Catalog Folder pane:

I can limit the number of images that Annoture has to search and speed it up dramatically. Instead of searching 10,000 images, iView will only search a few hundred. That drops the processing time from 15 seconds per image down to less than one.

Since I tagged all of the images in my iView catalog with iviewimport, any of the imported images in my Aperture that were not successfully processed by Annoture lack the iviewimport keyword. So after copying the metadata for each project I run a filter that looks for all images without iviewimport in the IPTC keyword field:

Now I can examine those images and figure out why they could not be found in the iView catalog. The usual reason is that the image was never put into the iView catalog and hence has no metadata. In other cases the iView thumbnail was incorrect and somehow had become attached to a different image.

Import is now done. Next is the final step: reorganization.

Tags: Aperture, iView, Importing, Keywords, Library

Apple's web site is promising something big. But what? My guess is nothing big. Instead we will get a lot of small somethings but they will add up significantly as the year goes by. Steve Jobs will promise "more to come", only giving part of the picture at a time. It will be a big year for Apple.

I will be at MWSF this year (on Thursday 11th) finding out what I can about all the new stuff.

Tags: Apple

Apple has a long and useful Knowledgebase article all about setting up and optimizing your printer, your system, and Aperture for printing.

Tags: Aperture, Printing

I just discovered that the ISO button on the Canon S3 allows me to change the brightness of movies while they are being shot. It appears to add a bias to the automatic exposure. The MF button is also a handy one for shooting movies: it locks the focus and prevents hunting in low light.

Tags: Canon, S3, Movies, Tips And Tricks

We made these delicious candy treats over the holiday: chocolate on a pretzel. Here is how to do it (original recipe from Family Fun magazine):

1. Get some bite-size, waffle-shaped pretzels, Hershey's Kiss or Hershey's Hug candies, and M&M's candies (Smarties for the Brits).

2. Heat the oven to 170ºF (75 C). Set a number of bite-size, waffle-shaped pretzels (one for each treat) in a single layer on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper, then top each pretzel with an unwrapped Hershey's Kiss or Hershey's Hug.

3. Bake for 4 to 6 minutes (the white chocolate will melt more quickly), until the chocolates feel soft when touched with a wooden spoon. It is easy to overheat them, so go carefully with just a few until you can get it right. Remove the cookie sheet from the oven and quickly (gently) press an M&M's candy into the center of each Kiss.

4. Allow the treats to cool for a few minutes, then place them in the refrigerator to set, about 10 minutes.

Tags: Food, Interesting Stuff, Chocolate