I have diagnosed the cause of the problem I discovered yesterday. It has nothing to do with write-only files (although those will cause other problems and that is a bug that should be fixed): it is the fact that the image files have no extension. I got into this mess by importing the images by reference and leaving them were they were and then consolidating them and selecting the Move option.

To recover:

1. Open the Aperture library package with control click and select Show Package Contents

2. Find the affected project, open that package, and drill down to the individual image folders

3. Open the folder for an affected image and look for the file ending in .apfile. Open that with an XML editor or a text editor. Here is one:

Notice that the extension field is blank. And the imagepath and name fields have the file name without an extension.

4. Change those to the filename with the correct extension.

5. Change the item called extension from blank to JPG or whatever the extension should be. I used upper case because that is what Aperture uses.

6. Save and close

Here is my example fixed:

7. Rename the original file in the image folder by adding the correct extension (.jpg in my case)

8. Repeat for all affected images

9. Find the Aperture application icon and command option double click. Aperture will launch and ask you if you want to rebuild the library. Click Now and it will do its work. Not rebuilding the library will not do any harm, but if you don't rebuild it then the database is out of sync with the apfiles and the broken images will still be broken.

This seems to fix the problem for me, but I have simply replaced my library and files with back up copies now.

Tags: Aperture, Recover, Importing

Don't do what I just did. It caused my Aperture library problems serious enough that I am currently restoring it from a back up. I don't believe I have lost any images or data, just suffered some inconvenience. Others may not be so lucky.

So what did I do? I imported read-only JPG images that lacked JPG extensions as referenced masters and then consolidated them using the Move option. The result was that although Aperture had them in its library (still as read only files), it was convinced that they were referenced but not readable, so showing me the broken link badge. The situation is unrecoverable as far as I could determine.

I am not sure which exact combination of events caused this, but I am sure that the missing extension is part of it. Only the images with the missing extension show the problem. Although I am sure that the read-only JPGs in the library will cause problems later.

Tags: Aperture, Updates, Library

Maybe a stupid/simple question: So I am viewing a project in fullscreen, and I want to flag certain interesting photos so I can look at them later for editing or export. How do I do this?

If keywords are sufficient for your need to mark images, then they can be added easily in full screen mode. The method I am about to describe works outside of full screen mode too. It is just not obvious that it does work in full screen mode because the controls are hidden.

Let's assume you want to mark the images for adjustment and so will use a keyword Action > Adjust to mark them. Make sure the viewer is visible (press V if it is not), bring up the Keyword Controls with shift D:

and select Edit Buttons...

Add the keyword Adjust in a convenient place

And add that keyword to one of the button sets. I am adding it to my Action button set:

Now click OK to close the dialog (maybe locking the keywords) and look at the Keyword Controls bottom right. Scroll through the sets with the period and comma keys until you get to the set with the Adjust keyword:

In this example it is attached to the 6 key. Option 6 adds it and shift option 6 removes it.

When you view your images full screen, make sure you have the correct button set displayed, and then as you navigate through the images press option 6 to mark for adjusting. If you have metadata display turned off you will see no change to the image. All selected images displayed in full screen will have the keyword added unless Primary Only (S key) is turned on. You can of course use multiple keywords set up for different keys and tag with any number of them.

It is possible to combine this technique with a smart album and negative filtering to make all marked images vanish from the current album as they are marked. This is handy when you are trying to reduce a set of images down to a predefined number.

Tags: Q&A, Aperture, Full Screen, Keywords

I caption all of my "keep" images: those with one star or more. That might seem like a huge amount of unnecessary work, but it is not. I caption tens, sometimes hundreds, at a time. And it is valuable. Since I only keyword the "show" and "brag" images (two or three stars), the captions offer a method of finding images and tying large groups of non-keyworded images to keyworded ones.

To start captioning I get rid of everything except the grid. Option command B maximizes the grid browser and W gets rid of the project pane if it is there.

Then I filter down to one star and select broad swaths of images by shift-clicking, command-clicking or just dragging boxes. Command-dragging boxes works too, and by a combination of command-clicking and shift-clicking I can quickly select all kinds of combinations of images.

I start by captioning the broadest set. Having select the images that the caption will be added to I hit command shift B to bring up the batch change dialog and select Caption Only from the Add Metadata From pop-up. This gets rid of extraneous clutter on the dialog. Then I type in the caption and hit Enter on the numeric keypad. That saves clicking the OK button. Return on the main keyboard adds a line return in the caption box.

In the example above I captioned hundreds of images with "A month in Europe". Next I make smaller selections and caption those. I am looking to capture information that would not be contained in the other metadata, so I am not going to caption by country or by date, or by something that is useless for finding things like "Week 3". Examples of useful captions are "Rhone Valley rail trip", "Car breakdown in the Italian alps", "North of the Arctic circle".

Since I leave the Append button selected in the Batch Change dialog, each caption gets added to the ones already there and separated with a comma. I always caption once, often twice, but have not needed to caption three times yet. That could happen if, for instance, I attended a memorable event inside the Arctic circle on the month-long European trip, and wanted to caption those images "Vegard's costume party".

To take a quick look at a thumbnail while captioning I can hit V to bring back the viewer and V to remove it again. Setting the Primary Only view mode (option R) from the View selection allows me to look at just the one image I have selected. As an alternative to V, I can hit F to go into full-screen mode and F to go back again.

Tags: Aperture, Captions

I have two 180G Firewire 800 drives that used to be my back up pair (back when everything would fit on that). Since the 24 inch iMac has one Firewire 800 port I thought it might be interesting to see if there is anything to be gained daisy-chaining them and setting them up as a striped RAID set.

I partitioned each drive into ten partitions. This let me pick the first and last partitions for testing: the first being the fastest (closest to the edge of the disk) and the last being the slowest (closest to the center). Then I ran three disk speed tests with XBench.

Single first and Single last tested just one partition on one drive. Striped first tested the first partition on each drive striped. Striped last tested the last partition on each drive striped. Mirrored first tested the first partition on each drive mirrored. Mirrored last tested the last partition on each drive mirrored. For comparison I also included the results from the internal 750G SATA drive and a single Firewire 400 drive. Here are the results in Mbytes per second for 256K transfers and a 32K RAID segment size.

With a 256K RAID segment size I tried a few more tests. I took three very large files totaling 9.89GB and copied them from the internal hard drive to the striped RAID pair, then copied them back to the internal hard drive, then duplicated them on the RAID.

I think this RAID set up will be useful if I need a scratch disk, particularly if the processing that is occurring is reading from one disk and writing to another.

Tags: iMac, RAID, Firewire, Interesting Stuff

Having written an article on editing Canon S3 video with Final Cut Express, I thought I would see what iMovie can do with the footage. I don't need FCE for many quick movies, so iMovie is the weapon of choice.

I create an iMovie project and select DV Widescreen since I want a wide screen aspect ratio:

The raw footage from the S3 is 640x480 so it will not fit the aspect ratio of widescreen 640x360 and the result is black bars on each side:

I have to chop off the top and bottom 1/8 of the image before importing into iMovie. To do this I open it in Quicktime and export it using Apple Intermediate Codec (you probably need the Pro version to do this). The video settings are like this:

And the size settings are set to Custom with the width and height set so:

I elect to crop the top and bottom to maintain the aspect ratio of the source. The resulting movie is about 75% of the size of the on I started with -- about right considering that 1/4 of the area has been removed. This step is also a good opportunity to shorten the length of the clip by not exporting any footage at the beginning and end that will not be used.

Now importing the clip makes it fit the frame:

And it is ready for editing.

Tags: Canon, S3, Widescreen, Movies, iMovie

I had been toying with two alternatives to buying the 24 inch iMac now: buying a MacPro now, and buying an iMac with the Santa Rosa chip set when they come out next year.

To justify a MacPro and its accompanying hit on the wallet I would have had to keep it for a long time. It would have offered a great deal of expandability that I would have used eventually, but I would have had a mainly empty, unused computer for much of its life. The RAM is expensive and that is a big put-off. And the future of FBRAM is not one of high volume and falling costs. It appears to be a stop-gap measure to allow large amounts of memory at the expense of latency and the market for that is relatively small. I don't think we will be seeing large price reductions for a while. I would have needed a screen (23") and 4G RAM, plus a fast graphics card. And all that adds up very quickly.

The other possibility was a 24" iMac. The better graphics was a big draw, as was the big screen. The 3G RAM limit is a pain: Apple was asking $575 extra for 3G over 2G. So the solution was to wait for the new version with the Santa Rosa chip set due out early 2007. That chip set will remove the 3G limit and the iMacs will support 4G. But Santa Rosa appears to be delayed, and so it was not worth the nine-month or whatever wait to get something that might appear. The cost of the iMac was about half what I would be spending on a MacPro. So for the same money I could get a new computer twice as often.

Buying now means that I get a fairly mature machine. The Intel iMacs have been around for a while now and the 24" has the most space and the least thermal limitations, so it should be reliable. And buying now means that I get the benefit of the faster machine right now. I can live with 2G of RAM and when prices are reasonable, upgrade to 3G. I got the machine with the biggest hard drive available (750G) because I know I will fill it up and it is not replaceable.

In a couple of years I might want to upgrade. I won't have a highly expensive MacPro that is still half-used telling me that I should really keep it for another couple of years. I will have a slow, maxed-out iMac that is ready for replacement. Another thing to consider is that my Macs get handed down, and it is much easier to hand down iMacs than any other sort of Mac because the screen is built-in. And the recipients of the hand-me-downs don't need the power of a MacPro any way.

Tags: iMac, MacPro, Interesting Stuff

I'm very new to Aperture, and am still struggling with stacks, though. My problem is that I'd like to put multiple versions of a single photo in a stack, cropped for different print sizes (with keywords of "5x7", "8x10", &c). But I also want to use stacks for selecting the best shot of several similar ones. My problem comes when I want to do both: Stack several shots together, but have multiple versions of the "pick." How do you do this without getting very confused?

[Update: A reader pointed out to me that filters on regular albums do include stacks that have members matching the filter. This behavior is not the same as projects (no match) or smart albums (match and extract images). I have amended the article to include this].

It is not obvious, but Aperture already does this for you: if you put images in a stack and then create versions, those versions are grouped with the originals. But there is a twist: if you leave the variations in the stack then a regular project filter cannot find them. The only way to find them is with an album: a smart album will find and extract the images; a regular album will find the images in the stack, but not extract them.

Look at this rather contrived example. Here are four images in a stack, with the pick on the left:

I want to manage two different crops of each of these. I'll make the crops really obvious so they can be distinguished in this example: one set of crops will be vertical and the other set horizontal. In real life they would have more realistic aspect ratios. I will start with the pick. I duplicate the version and drag it out of the stack (option drag does that in one step):

Then I crop it and keyword it:

Then duplicate the same original with option drag and crop it again, this time vertically, and keyword it:

Now I repeat that for the other images in the stack, just leaving them loose in the project:

A big mess. But that is OK because they are tagged and have the same file name as the originals. I can still find anything I need.

To find all the cropped images based on, say, the third image in the stack I have to do some filtering. Selecting that image and bringing up the inspector with control D lets me look at the file name (add the file name to the display using instructions here if it is not visible):

I copy the file name from the field: "Pine tree chopping22.JPG" and paste it into the project's filter dialog in the Other Metadata section:

And select is as the condition:

Here are the resulting images:

Notice that the original does not show up. That's because it is inside a stack in a project -- and only albums can see inside stacks. That is why I left the cropped versions loose in the project.

That found all of the crops based on one image, now what about the opposite: all of the images with one crop? To find all the horizontal images I filter on that keyword in the project. Since the cropped versions are loose in the project they are found:

Now let's do an experiment and see what happens if I tidy up the loose images. I select them all and hit command K to create a new stack:

Those grey rectangles inside the new stack have collected together images that are derived from the same original. What happens if I drag all of that stack into the original stack? This:

The originals and their versions are neatly grouped together! This is great, except that filtering the project on Horizontal now gets me this:

Nothing. Since this is a project filter and the pick does not match Horizontal, the whole stack is ignored. So I have to create an album.

A regular album will find any stacks that include the keyword, but will not extract the images. This tells me where to look, but not what to look at. In this case it is not very useful because every stack with a horizontal crop will be included along with all the other crops available in those stacks.

A smart album will match the keyword I specify and will extract the images. To create the smart album I select the project (important because I want the scope of the filter to be limited to that project):

And select the keyword I need, and check the Ignore Stack Groupings checkbox. That is the magic that lets the filter look inside the stacks and extract the images:

And as you can see, the four horizontal images have been displayed. But now I have lost my stacking information: which one was the pick? That is an inconvenient, but not unworkable problem.

So there are some trade-offs in the way that Aperture has implemented filtering and displaying stacks. I would do everything inside the stacks and have no loose images. I say that because the most important selection will be of the image. The crop follows. Once you have found the image in the stack that you want you can click on the crops and look at the metadata to pick the one you need.

Tags: Aperture, Q&A, Stacks, Adjustments, Versions

Here are some more observations from running Aperture on the 24" Core 2 Duo iMac for a few days.

Importing is very fast. I think it is faster than the roughly four times speed up I have been seeing in other areas. I plug in my card into the reader and the image thumbnails fly onto the screen at a rate of twenty a second or so. This is probably not all Aperture: it could be just that USB is faster on this machine. Once I press the Import button they are copied into the library at about four times the speed of my G5 iMac, appearing in groups of about twenty. Previously only four or five would appear at the same time.

In full screen mode or if I click on the image in the viewer the scroll ball on the Mighty Mouse flicks through images instantly as I roll it up and down. If I stop, there is about a second before the full-resolution image appears.

Straightening images is still slow, but not as slow as with the G5. If I add adjustments and then straighten it is very slow, so I think I will be straightening first.

A smart album that filters the entire library of 20,000 images takes about 6 seconds to fill the screen with thumbnails. Pressing F to go to full screen takes a second or less.

Creating a web gallery from 335 images takes about three seconds. A smart album of 70 rejects for the whole library appears immediately. It takes about 8 seconds to delete all of them. And album of 660 images takes about two seconds to appear. Books take about two seconds to appear. Autostacking is now usable, stacking in real time and taking about two seconds to fully display all the images.

Zooming on images is limited to five, the same as my G5 iMac.

A full text search for the word "hello" on 20,000 images takes about 38 seconds to return an empty result. Doing the same thing with a limited search for the word "keep" returns three images in four seconds. That big difference is because the full-text search is linear, while the limited search uses the database.

Tags: Aperture, iMac, Performance

I often use each of several slightly different variations of an image for different purposes. I may use one as an original for my Canon S3 gallery, one as a quickly adjusted image for my desktop wallpaper, and one as a "made better" image for showing off.

How do I manage these variations? If I keep these versions in different places that are related to the way the image is to be used (such as in projects or albums), then how will I ever find all the variations of one image? If I keep them all together, then how will I know what purpose each is to be used for?

I solve the dilemma by putting all of the variations into a stack so they are grouped together and then using keywords to reveal their purpose. Here is an example:

The leftmost image has a caption, keywords, and ratings and it has been adjusted. That is my show-off image, so it is the pick. The center image is a copy of the leftmost image, but has different adjustments, including cropping. This one has an extra keyword attached: Actions > Wallpaper. The rightmost image is completely unadjusted and unrated. The only keyword attached is Actions > Bagelturf Gallery.

With my images all collected together into a stack, if find one, I find them all. To use them for different purposes I create smart albums, one per purpose. One of them looks for recent wallpaper images. As well as filtering on the Wallpaper keyword, it also has the following settings:

The date condition defines recent as shot in the last three months. The checkbox at the bottom is important because it allows this filter to look inside stacks. Without that the stack that I used above would hide the non-pick variations I want to find. I have a similar filter for Bagelturf Gallery that collects all the images that I post in the Canon S3 gallery.

To use one of the smart albums I just select it, let the images load, and then export the result, or use the associated previews.

As an alternative I could have not used a stack, but instead have tagged all the related images with a common keyword. But this quickly runs into trouble. I have to make all of my tags different, and when I have many images and just a few purposes, it is easier to tag for purpose than for image. Using versions names could work, but it is easily broken because version names are often modified.

Tags: Aperture, Stacks, Tips And Tricks

What else have I been doing with this new monster on my desk over the past few days? It has not been all plain sailing, but the issues I have encountered have been minor, easily diagnosed, and fixed quickly.

First I backed it up to a 750G Firewire drive using SuperDuper. I use two of these drives in rotation (keeping one off-site at all times) and make a copy of the hard drive onto sparse disk image. I could not use an incremental back up as I usually do because everything had been updated in the move from the old G5 iMac, so this took a long time: about four hours for 160G of data (600,000 files, encrypted disk image). A second back up to a different drive without using a disk image or encryption took 2 hours 15 minutes.

Next I went through all my applications and utilities checking to see what was PowerPC and what was Intel or Universal. I did this quickly by bringing up the file inspector with option command I. It looks just like the file information window (command I), but updates as I click on different files. So this cuts out all the opening and closing of windows I would have had to do. Each time I found a PowerPC only application that I still wanted I made an alias of it on my desktop with option command drag, and when complete, I put all of those into a folder. This gives me a list of applications to go seek out Intel versions later. Pretty much everything I care about is now Intel. A few lingering Classic applications will no longer run (Intel Macs have no Classic support), so those were deleted. I found out later that another way to find all of my PowerPC applications is to use System Profiler. The Applications section finds them all and they can be sorted by CPU.

On opening GarageBand I found that all my audio units were missing. These are plug-ins that provide audio processing and synthesizers. Again this was a CPU difference problem, so I had to go find updates for those. My USB audio box (MobilePre) was showing up, but not working. I had to uninstall and reinstall the driver to fix that. It seems I already had an Intel driver, but the installer only installs the one needed at the time. While applications can be universal, some of the more fundamental parts of the OS cannot and need separate code for each CPU.

Migration Assistant had copied across all my network settings including the static IP address and warned me that I was going to have a problem if I didn't change one. I fixed that by changing the old Mac to DHCP.

RapidWeaver, the application I use to write this blog, developed a problem whereby it would hang loading my site file. I trashed the prefs and that was fixed. There were some interface changes following that, so I think that this was not an Intel problem at all, but a preferences corruption that had occurred a long time ago that just happened to not be fatal on PowerPC.

Not much maxes out the CPUs. They are usually very evenly loaded (I use Menu Meters to view their activity), so this implies that most applications are efficiently multithreaded. Even when I do max them out, the machine is still perfectly responsive, handles network traffic, launches applications, etc. Exporting from Aperture, converting video files, that kind of thing are the only activities that are limited by the CPU. I can hear the fans if I stress the machine, but I have to think about it. The hard drive is the noisiest part when it is doing a lot of seeking. Audio applications like GarageBand and iTunes hardly make a dent in the CPU.

Window resizing is silky smooth. I'm doing it right now while converting a 250MB AVI file from my digital camera to H.264. Playing two 1080p HD movies at the same time certainly makes the machine busy, but doesn't slow it down. So where are the limitations? Probably mainly in the hard drive -- seek time and transfer speed. Sometimes in the memory access. I can't do anything about the RAM except for an upgrade to 3G when the 2G sticks come down in price. But I could speed the disk access with an external RAID system on the FW800 bus.

Apple Remote Desktop 2.2 did not work as an administrator on this Intel Mac. But there is a fix. It involves deleting some files that cause the incompatibility. A side effect is that it becomes impossible to manage this Mac remotely. But that is not a problem for me.

Tags: iMac, SuperDuper, Migration, Interesting Stuff

Is there a way to set up a Smart Album for photos that have not be edited or adjusted? I looked for a parameter to do that, but can't find it. I know edited photos get marked and I could manually keyword the unmarked ones, but I wanted to see if you found a more automatic way of collecting together unedited photos in Aperture.

There is no way to do this with Aperture 1.5.1. I have seen it requested a number of times and could certainly use it myself. It's a pretty basic workflow requirement. Aperture should be able to filter and sort on any image attribute. The list view does give access to a column that includes the badges:

but alas sorting does not work on that column. So although there is a compact visual way of finding the unadjusted ones, it is not even possible to sort all the badged items to one end of the grid view.

Tags: Q&A, Aperture, Adjustments, Filtering

While I am on the subject of new Mac experiences, Mark Morford, writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, vividly and hilariously describes his new Macbook Pro:

I have right here in my hot little hands that actually aren't all that little and are only slightly warm at the moment a brand new lick-ready smooth-as-love Apple MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo Super Orgasm Deluxe Ultrahard Modern Computing Device Designed by God Herself Somewhere in the Deep Moist Vulva of Cupertino Yes Yes Don't Stop Oh My God Yes.

He exaggerates, of course, but not by much. Apple is going to drag the whole industry, kicking and screaming, weighed down by the rolled-over SUV that is Microsoft to a new place. Here is Microsoft's own marketing effort, describing Vista and why you should have it:

Windows Vista introduces a breakthrough user experience and is designed to help you feel confident in your ability to view, find, and organize information and to control your computing experience.

The visual sophistication of Windows Vista helps streamline your computing experience by refining common window elements so you can better focus on the content on the screen rather than on how to access it. The desktop experience is more informative, intuitive, and helpful. And new tools bring better clarity to the information on your computer, so you can see what your files contain without opening them, find applications and files instantly, navigate efficiently among open windows, and use wizards and dialog boxes more confidently.

See the disconnect here? Microsoft markets Vista like it is a cure for something socially unacceptable like smelly feet, not as something pleasurable and desirable like chocolate. They describe what you get, but they don't show anyone getting it. It's techno-twaddle, speeds and feeds, data points and powerpoint bullets. I've never sat down at my Mac either wanting or expecting a "computing experience" any more than I have gone into my bank seeking a "financial experience" or got into my car for an "internal combustion experience".

I come here to get things done and expect the computer and the operating system to get out of my way and let me do them. I don't care about files, information, processes, window elements, visual sophistication, or any of that. And suddenly boatloads of people are discovering that despite what they have been told, they don't care either. They just want to get things done. And that they actually can is an emotional and freeing experience. Mike Morford again:

She became excited. She became suddenly thrilled with the idea that she could, with a little effort and time and far less grudging techy BS than even she imagined, use these divinely inspired and thoughtfully made tools to make the movies she has always wanted, even stylize and edit and post them herself. Empowering? You said it.

And that describes the same one way trip that millions are making now.

Tags: MacBook Pro, Lust, Interesting Stuff

On Monday I ordered a Core 2 Duo 24" iMac from the online Apple Store with some extras: better graphics, big hard drive, 2G RAM. I'll be busy over Thanksgiving I thought, moving over all my stuff from my 20" PowerPC G5 iMac and fixing problems.

It arrived Thursday morning. It is big. The screen is perfect. And it is fast. I repartitioned the HD, loaded the OS, downloaded 400MB of updates (1.8G if you include the XCode tools), and generally checked it out. On Friday morning I left Migration Assistant doing its thing for about 4 hours. It's Friday evening and there is basically nothing to do except reenter in a few application serial numbers. Total time actually spent at the computer to achieve this: about half an hour.

Seriously, Migration Assistant is the closest thing to magic I have experienced in a long time. It really epitomizes the It Just Works aspect of Apple. Everything works: preference panels, applications, background processes, drivers. You name it, it's there working. All the junk on the desktop is there too, the layout stretched so that it covers the screen in the same way it used to on the smaller machine instead of being huddled in one corner. A nice touch.

Aperture is about four times faster. Much more usable. Tons of screen real estate. A bright, bright screen that makes the G5 look dull and gray in comparison. The only thing that has maxed out the CPUs so far is Aperture. Rosetta is in there somewhere, but I don't notice it running my old PowerPC code at all.

No wonder Apple's stock is doing so well. They have perfected the experience of driving a new computer off the lot. I've been a Mac user since 1992 (this will be my 5th Mac), so I shouldn't be surprised or excited, but I am. They are that good.

Tags: iMac, Migration, Interesting Stuff

A little-known feature of Aperture is that it will let you compare images side-by-side in the viewer even if they are in different projects or albums. For example, if I have an album of highly-rated images against which I want to compare candidates for five stars, I can open the candidates project alongside the album of highly-rated images and pick one image from each to view simultaneously.

Here is how to do it. Click on one project or album, then Option-click the second one. That will display two grids of thumbnails:

Use Shift W and Option W to get the grid views and the viewer arranged the way you want them. Shift W "rotates" the viewer and the grid and Option W swaps them left/right/top/bottom.

Now select the Compare image by clicking on it and hitting Return, or just option-command click if you want to save a key press. In the picture above the Compare image is the one with the orange border.

As long as the viewer is not in Primary Only mode (put it in multi mode with option U if it is) clicking on another image in the other project will show it as the compared image. Here are the two images displayed together in my viewer:

Clicking on another image or using the arrow keys will change the compared image (white border). Option command clicking on an image or using option with the arrow keys will move the Compare image.

This all works in full-screen mode too, but the Compare image is static and cannot be changed.

Tags: Aperture, Comparing, Browsers

O'Reilly Digital Media has now posted a second interview with Joe Schorr, Apple's Product manager for Aperture. In this interview he talks about referenced files.

Tags: Interview, Aperture, Referenced

I’ve very much enjoyed reading our articles about Aperture. You obviously know you’re way around the program. Have you come up with a system to quickly delete rejects? The Aperture manual doesn’t even talk about deleting rejects. The method I’m using I find painfully slow. Presently I select an image, hit the #9 key and mark it as a reject. I then select view all rejects. I highlight all of them and then go to File>Delete Master and all Versions. It then deletes the last image I selected, not all the ones highlighted. I have to follow up and delete each image individually.  I want to love this program but It’s difficult due to how hard it is to get rid of bad images easily. It’s obvious Apple doesn’t want this to happen since they don’t even have anything about deleting rejects in the PDF manual which I searched. Any thoughts are greatly appreciated and maybe this is a good idea for an article. Thanks in advance.

What you are missing is that you have Primary Only turned on. It's very easy to do this by accident because the shortcut is the S key. Here is the button:

If turned on, whatever you do will only affect the primary (thick white outline) image, not all the others (thin white outline). Here are six images in the viewer (not thumbnails -- just a very small viewer pane) with Primary Only turned off:

And here is primary Only turned on. Notice that only the primary is shown with a line around:

Here are two ways of deleting rejects, each with its own advantages and disadvantages:

Delete Rejects In The Current Project or Album
Press keys in this sequence: Control 8, Command A, Command Delete, Return.

Control 8 shows just the rejects, removing any other filter in use. Command A selects all of them. Command Delete deletes them. Return accepts the dialog box. And the state of the Primary Selection Only does not matter to Command Delete. There is a catch with this method of deleting though -- this will not delete rejects that are inside stacks. But the second method below gets those too.

Delete Rejects In The Entire Library
I have a smart album that I set up to delete rejects across the entire library:


Notice that it was created with the Library selected so it applies across all projects. And that the Ignore Stack Grouping is checked. That lets it look inside stacks and means that I don't have to mess with opening and closing stacks all over to clear out the rejects.

I select the smart album, then command A, command Delete, Return. It can be good to command option B before all that to maximize the browser in order to give the images one last check.

Tags: Q&A, Aperture, Deleting, Referenced

It's hard to ignore the Zune because there is so much noise about it right now. That's not the happy ka-ching of cash registers though, it's the sound of reviewers ripping it to shreds. Even the enthusiastic ones are realizing what an incredible piece of brand destruction Microsoft has pulled off. Here is a representative article from Playfuls where the reviewer started with a positive attitude and met with an opinion-changing and bewildering parade of stupidities: The Stupid, Idiotic and Annoying Things about the Zune-brick.

And don't buy the "this is our first attempt" excuse: they've had Plays For Sure and their own music store fiascos before this one. What's going on? The product has clearly been rushed to market. The software won't run on Vista (yes really!), the installer marketing looks amateurish, the messages are confusing and dated; the list goes on and on. I see a company out of touch with its users and with itself, flailing around, so unable to get traction that it is basically unable to make meaningful product releases any more. Either those tens of thousands of new hires they have been adding are working on a super-secret new operating system project that will reinvent the company, or they are turning the corner into a slow death spiral, much the same way as SGI did.

Tags: Microsoft, Pigs With Lipstick

Watermarks are broken in Aperture 1.5.1. They are added before the image is scaled, so end up being tiny if you reduce for export. This means that all of the export presents in 1.5 are not usable for now.

Aperture 1.5 did this:

And Aperture 1.5.1 does this:

Victor Maldonato has a workaround, posted in Apple's Aperture forums. Create a watermark as big as your biggest image and use that. To keep the image file size down make sure that the watermark image consists of text plus transparency only (no background).

Tags: Aperture, Watermarking

Engadget tries to install the software that comes with the Zune and has some difficulty. It took 20 minutes, several crashes, restarts, and tons of registration, including the need to create a "tag":

While we were figuring out which tag to use, we were suggested some pretty awesome(ly awful) names:
• TwinightRyan (sp)
• UprightRyan
• GrizzlyRyan
• PraisedCloud
• ScapularWorm and
• HangingCheetah
• PricyRacketeer
• GutlessStudent
• WontedSum
• PeeweeDust
Do we LOOK like a scapular worm to you? Don't answer that.

Make sure you read the comments as well.

Tags: Microsoft, Pigs With Lipstick

Apple has released another Digital Camera Raw update for PPC and Intel Macs.

Tags: Aperture, Updates, Photography

By using a simple trick, revealed in a conversation with Anthony Caltabiano, I have found that I can make all keywords appear in the filter dialog and so make it possible to filter quickly and accurately on any keyword at any level, something thought impossible.

In a previous article, I described how Aperture's keyword system only directly allows filtering by the lowest level keywords. By lowest level I mean the ones at the bottom of the keyword hierarchy. For example:

Content > Water > Ocean > Surf

Surf is the lowest level. Any time I add Surf to an image, the higher-level keywords Ocean, Water, and Content are sort of added to the image -- they are visible in the metadata pane -- but not usefully added to the image because they don't appear in the keyword checkbox list on a filter dialog. While it is possible to work around this using the IPTC keyword field, it is clumsy and error-prone.

Maybe Apple will deal with this in future (Aperture is at 1.5.1 as I write), but until then, we need help. I have a small example project with images, all tagged according to content:

To do this tagging I used the following hierarchy (yes I know a turtle is not a mammal, but there it is):

I tagged by dragging the lowest level keywords to the images. If I want to filter by Water I cannot do it directly because Water does not appear in the keyword list on the filter dialog:

As expected, clicking on Stone gives me this selection:

Now for the magic. I take the image below (click for full-size version) and add it to the project.

This is my keyword keeper. Any image will do, but this one is useful because it identifies itself. Now I bring up the keyword HUD (shift H) and select and drag every high-level keyword I want to filter on to that image:

You can save a lot of clicking by knowing that the left and right arrows open and close the keyword levels in the HUD, and the up and down arrows move the selection up and down. Command-clicking on keywords selects more than one. There probably are not all that many higher-level keywords in any library, because most of the keyword population is at the lowest level.

Now that the Keyword Keeper image has those keywords, let's look at the keyword HUD again:

All those high level words are there! And if I click on Animal I get the following as expected:

To integrate this method into your library you will need a few extra steps:

1. Create a new project call Keyword Keeper and put the Keyword Keeper image into it. Add all the high level keywords as above.

2. Create a new keyword at the top level called Keyword Keeper and add it to the Keyword Keeper image. This is an important step, as it will save much effort later.

3. Now duplicate the image into all of the projects you want to by clicking on it and option-dragging. The copies will retain all the keywords.

At a future date, when you expand your keyword hierarchy, you will need to update your Keyword Keeper images. To do this, select the Library and filter on the keyword Keyword Keeper. Select all of them and drag the new higher-level keyword onto one of them. Now the new keyword will work in all of the projects that contain the Keyword Keeper image.

Tags: Aperture, Filtering, Keywords, Hierarchy

My rating habit has changed over the time I have had Aperture: I now only rate images one, two, or three stars. No fours or fives. Why is that? It's down to lack of time, lack of purpose, and simply that three stars are enough. Besides, who decided that five was the right number?

Star Rating Takes Time
Fewer stars means that I spend less time going through images changing ratings. Once I get to three, then I am done. Rating is easier because there are only three buckets the images can fall into, so I think much less when doing it and can do it in fewer passes. With only three stars I am so limited that I can't dream up any clever systems that I have to remember to follow.

Rate For A Reason
I don't have a specific need for five rating levels, and I am not sure that most other people do either. There is nothing I can point to that all four-star rated images achieve that three-star images do not. Why five levels? Who decided that five was the right number, and why? It is kind of traditional I think, the way that it has often been done. I see rating as a much more useful system for excluding images than for including them and adding more rating buckets does not help that.

Three Stars Is Enough
Here are the rating buckets that I now use:

Reject	Junk	Throw it in the trash
One star	Keep	Too good to trash, but not good enough to show anyone
Two stars	Show	Good enough to show people
Three stars	Brag	Good enough to say Look At That, I Did That

That's all there is to it. I can rate in two passes with this system, instead of four or more with five stars. The first pass handles all the rejects and applies one star to anything I would ever want to show anyone. It's a very simple and fast decision to make. Then I select everything that has not been rejected and add one star, so I am left with one-star images marked as Keep, and all the Show and Brag images with two stars. On the second pass (filtered down to the two star or better images, now about 20% to 25% of the original quantity) I add one star to the images that I think are good enough to brag about -- a few percent.

I caption all the Keep and above images (but very broadly so I can do 50 at a time), keyword the Show and above images, and adjust the Brags.

Why Only One Rating Per Image?
Image ratings have a serious problem that is made worse by greater granularity: the current star ratings are only one dimensional. They allow me to rate either one aspect of the image but not indicate what that aspect is, or rate all aspects, but not give them weights. When I look at an image to rate it I have to compromise between all the qualities and come up with a single rating that takes everything into consideration. More stars mean that that is harder to achieve (particularly consistently over the long term) and takes longer to do.

Let me illustrate. I have an image that has excellent composition and color, but is out of focus. As a large image it would get a three, but as a small image, a five. Or the opposite, a technically perfect image with a piece of the subject out of the frame. If I had a specific use for a part of the image it would get a five, but as it is, only a two. How do I rate these?

I would like to see Aperture implement a much more flexible rating system. Instead of a single five-star system I would like one that gives me as many three-star (or even two star!) ratings as I can think up. This would not only be easy to use and very flexible, but would let each person personalize their ratings so that the ratings worked for them, instead of them working for the ratings as is now the case. Besides, this would be a wonderful tool for vendor lock-in: how would you ever move your metadata to another system if that system could not support your ratings?

How would I use a system like that? I would rate by subjects such as Focus, Composition, Color, Uniqueness, Noise, Happiness, Movement, Absurdity, Isolation, Roundness, Humor, Geometry -- good grief! There are so many things that I could do with this.

And don't forget that Unrated is valid for all of the rating subjects: I don't have to rate by Color if I don't want to or need to. I can record no opinion if I either have not had one or did not want to make one. So this system actually does not multiply the work because not thinking is a perfectly useful thing to do. If the color does not grab me as I look at the image, I don't rate it. I don't have to make a judgement about whether the lack of color appeal justifies moving the rating down from a five to a four, as in the current system.

Tags: Aperture, Rating

Many of my best photos (or at least the ones I like the most) are taken in the evening light. I like the color, the angle of the light, and the way that the long shadows cause contrast in a scene that does not exist at other times. This picture story is about using contrast and position to create isolation in an image.

Tags: Picture Story, Photography

An article at Wired News explains how raw processing power is moving to the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). For Aperture and for the Mac in general this is good news: image processing is handled by the GPU where ever possible and increasingly any parallelizable math will be too. Future hardware will see tremendous gains in performance beyond CPU speed increases.

There is a technical article about NVidia's Geforce 8800 at EETimes. The design of graphics processors has moved from being hard-coded to configurable to programmable to now to fully programmable -- a C compiler is available. At 681 million transistors it is one of the largest chips ever made, bigger than the biggest CPUs by several times.

Tags: Aperture, Performance

Much opinion on Slashdot about DSLRs, SLRs, and Point and Shoot cameras. Not as rabid as it could be.

Although I used to have an SLR, it is now a dust collector following a decade of unuse. I got back into photography in 1997 when the Apple Quicktake 200 came out. Apple gave me one free with a new Mac, and I was soon enthralled with the 640x480 images it put onto 2Mbyte Flash cards. I haven't gone DSLR yet because I don't have a specific photographic need, and without that I would end up much poorer and with a huge bag of lenses. I do want the quality, but the freedom and portability of the Canon S3 fits the bill for now.

Tags: DSLR, Interesting Stuff, Photography

Two recent articles related to performance:

Bare Feats stacks three Macs in a total of five configurations against each other. The tests they run are Lift and Stamp, Remove Adjustments, and Export Web Log. Check back at Bear Feats for more articles.

Adam Tow delves into the guts of Core Data and the SQLite database that underlies the organization of the Aperture database. He has some theories and discussion about the spinning pizza of death we have seen so often with Aperture.

Tags: Aperture, Performance

First off, your site is quite an excellent resource. Well done and keep up the good work! I have one question, which I'm hoping you know the answer to. I'm trying to move my Vault over to a network drive, but Samba doesn't seem to be able to handle the : characters inside the .appproject packages. Did you ever encounter this problem? If so, how did you get around it? If not, have you any ideas how I would get around this?

If the filing system were NFS+ and the connection AFP (Appletalk) then the answer would be in the article Network Vaults that describes how to create a vault on a server when Aperture refuses to allow it. However the question at hand is how to handle a file server running Samba (SMB/CIFS), and possibly a foreign filing system like NTFS where there are problems with the file names.

The answer is to create a disk image on the server and put the vault inside that. Exposing Aperture to a filing system that cannot handle the Mac path names results in errors like this:

By creating a disk image on the server the server sees a single large binary file and the Mac sees a complete HFS+ filing system.

There are two types of disk image that could be used for this: standard are sparse. A standard disk image (.dmg) has a fixed image file size and a fixed capacity. It behaves just like a regular physical disk. A sparse disk image (.sparseimage) has a fixed capacity, but its image file size varies with the amount of data it is holding. The one catch with sparse disk images is that they don't get any smaller when data is deleted from them. In either case, when the disk is full, you have to create another, bigger one. Both types of disk image can also be encrypted.

I recommend using a sparse disk image. Create one on your server by launching Disk Utility. Make sure nothing on the left pane is selected and then select File > New > Blank Disk Image.

Select sparse disk image from the pop-up and then specify the size. Pick something that is big enough to hold what you will need for the foreseeable future, but not so big that it will cause problems on your server when it is full-sized. Be aware that Aperture requires quite a lot of space held in reserve to be sure that it can write or update a vault.

If you want to encrypt the disk, do so. You can store the key in your keychain if you like. But make sure you don't lose the key or you will lose your data forever:

Navigate to your server and create the image there. Once you have created your disk image you will have a file that looks like this:

Even very large sparse disk images are small to start with. A 100GB sparse disk image is tens of MB in size when empty. To use the disk image, you must mount it. Just double-click it and it will appear on your desktop with your other drives:

Now you can create your vault on that mounted disk image drive:

Giving it a sensible name:

To unmount the volume, control click and select unmount. If you drag to trash, be careful to drag the volume to the trash, not the sparse disk image file to trash.

When your vault becomes too big for your sparse disk image delete it by deleting the sparse image file and emptying the trash. Now create a new bigger image with the same name and create a new vault on it.

Tags: Aperture, Vaults, Networking, Samba, Q&A, Disk Images

I discovered SuperCal the other day. It's a display calibration utility that does not need expensive hardware. It displays patterns and you move sliders to adjust what you see. It is kind of like Apple's ColorSync Utility, but does a lot more and allows for much more precise adjustment. I tried it on my monitor and it seems to work well.

Tags: Calibration, Interesting Stuff, Photography

By design, vaults are supposed to be stored on Firewire or other local, directly-attached drives. But this does not take into consideration all the people with large, fast servers and NAS systems who want to use those as backups for local library storage.

Here is how to create a vault on a network drive. This article applies only to storing a vault on a server with an HFS+ filing system accessed via Appletalk (AFP), such as another Mac or an XServe. Other situations require a different approach.

First I will attempt to create one and see what goes wrong. I go to the vault pane lower left and add use the action (cog) menu to create a new vault. I can have as many vaults as I like for my library, allowing me to keep drives off site and rotate them if I wish.:

The Add Vault dialog comes up, so I navigate to my server and try to create the vault:

But Aperture does not like what I am trying to do:

So I have to work around the check that is being made. Instead of trying to create the vault on the server I will create it locally and then copy it to the server. First I create a vault on my desktop and it appears in the vault pane:

Then I quit Aperture and copy the vault from the desktop to the server. The vault on the desktop is no longer needed, so I trash it -- but I get an errorr if I try to do that:

It is locked. Vaults are locked as a precaution against accidental deletion. I must unlock it first by selecting the vault on my desktop, hitting command I to get the information window, and then deselecting the Locked checkbox.

Now the vault icon has lost its little lock badge:

And I can drag it to the trash and empty the trash. But I am not quite done yet, because Aperture does not yet know about the vault that is on the server. If I launch Aperture and look at the vault pane:

I see that Aperture cannot locate the vault. To tell Aperture where the vault is located, I select the vault and select Update Vault Path from the action menu:

Now I can navigate to the vault on the server to update the path:

And Aperture is happy and can use it:

Finally I can back up my library to the new vault.

There is a new warning in Aperture 1.5 about backing up managed and referenced masters:

This is a very useful warning if I expected all my masters to be in the library, because it is telling me that not all of them will be backed up to a vault. Finding all referenced masters is easy: I click on the library and bring up the filter dialog. Select File Status from the + menu (and maybe set the rating to Rejected and Better):

And then select Referenced from the File status pop-up:

If I wish, I can save this as a Smart Album for immediate use as well.

Tags: Aperture, Vaults, Networking, Server

Goopymart posts a pictorial guide to teh internets on Flickr.

Tags: Fun, Internets, Interesting Stuff

I updated my copy of Aperture to 1.5.1. It took about an hour on my iMac G5 to complete its "synchronize" step, working through about 20,000 masters and 21,000 versions. It was bashing away on the disk like crazy the whole time, so a fast disk system will do much better than mine.

So far no problems. Smart albums seem to work for me, and I have not tried doing anything with contact sheets. Viewing thumbnails seems faster, but that may have been the database rebuild. I cannot see any changes to the library structure, so I think that the synchronize step was a sweep through the library to ensure that the database and the library data matched, maybe because bugs that were found in 1.5 could have caused them to be out of step.

Adjustments in the loupe are now fast enough that my slow old machine can keep up in real time. This is a big help.

I did have to reapply the modification to swap the 0 and 9 keys on the keypad. And it looks like updating vaults causes all the images to be written out because of the library changes.

Tags: Aperture, Updates

It's Saturday morning and you finally have chance to sit down and use Aperture. Your wallet weighs the same as it did yesterday because you are taking advantage of Apple's free trial. Now what? You have thirty days to play; how do you make the most of it?

Aperture Is Different
It's not Photoshop. It's not many things. It is not your current workflow. It will cause you to think about why you do the things you do, because under Aperture many of the limitations that created your ingrained habits have been removed. This blog article is a short recommendation on how to ease into Aperture so that you understand the important stuff early enough to not get frustrated when your misunderstandings are challenged later.

Create A Play Area
First set up an area you can play in. Create a folder on your desktop called Play. Find a couple of hundred photos and copy them in.

Next go to your Pictures folder in your home folder. You will create a new empty Aperture library to play with. Aperture does not have a File > New Library command, so work around it as follows. Look in your Pictures folder in your home folder. If there is a file called Aperture Library there already there and you have put photos into it you want to keep then:

1. Quit Aperture
2. Rename Aperture Library to Old Library
3. Launch Aperture, then quit it again. A new Aperture Library will be created
4. Rename that to Play Library
5. Rename Old Library to Aperture Library

If you have an Aperture library already and don't care about it, then just drag it to trash. Do steps 3 and 4 above to make the Play Library.

Now whenever you want to play with Aperture double-click on the Play Library icon, not the Aperture application icon. That will explicitly open the Play Library and you have no chance of messing anything else up. Create a few more folders inside the Play folder and use those to experiment with exporting, relocating, and other fun features. When you are done, just trash the whole folder.

Do A Little Reading
Aperture is set up by default to create previews for everything you put in. These slow down the performance, so you probably don't want them until you know you need them. Go and read Who Needs Previews to learn how to fully turn them off.

Next, make sure you understand the difference between referenced and managed masters by reading the Relocate and Consolidate article. And then have a look at how the library works in Five Simple Rules and Brown Folders. If you are feeling intrepid (and patient) then try Advanced Importing.

Import Your Images and Poke Around
Now you understand a little about how Aperture works, go ahead and import the throw-away images you put into the Play folder on your desktop. Work your way through the short articles on Workspace and Workflow and try a whole bunch of things.

Get Intrepid
Once you know your way around a little, try the Metadata and Stacks articles, and take the time go to the help menu and read all the material that Apple provides, including the entire user manual from cover to cover. I can't stress that enough. It is a very well-written and organized manual and will answer many of your questions.

Ask For Help
Apple's Aperture forums are busy and helpful. And this site has a Question and Answer page that invites you to email me with your problems and then shares the answers. There are also a lot of Aperture links at del.icio.us.

Tags: Aperture, Free Trial

I am seeing reports of a problem with smart albums under Aperture 1.5.1. It only affects smart albums that use ratings AND are have not been created inside a project (created at the library level). Creating a smart album inside a project makes it specific to that project, so this is not a workaround. Existing smart albums and those created under 1.5.1 seem to be broken.

Also, cropped images on contact sheets are said to be distorted.

I am not running 1.5.1 yet, so don't have any independent assessment of these.

Tags: Aperture, Smart Albums, Contact Sheets

Derrick Story at O'Reilly Digital Media has posted a 20 minute, 10MB interview with Joe Schorr, Product Manager for Apple's Aperture application. As well as handling the demanding job of managing the product, Joe is active on Apple's Aperture discussion pages and other photo sites where Aperture is discussed.

Tags: Aperture, Interview

A big day for Aperture.

The Aperture 1.5.1 update (128MB, requires serial number) includes many bug fixes and includes support for older Macs that use the 5200 graphics card. Notes say NOT to apply this to the trial version.

Early reports I have seen say that it spends a long time doing a Master Synchronization step, so plan accordingly. They also say that performance has increased.

RAW support for Mac OS X (2.4 MB) has been updated to include more cameras and fixes the vertical scratch problem that has plagued a number of Intel Mac owners. This will benefit any application that reads RAW, including Aperture and iPhoto.

Apple is now offering a fully-functional 30-day trial of Aperture. Once you decide you would like to keep it, buy a code to unlock it, or buy a retail box and use that code.

Tags: Aperture, Updates, Free Trial

There is finally a fast graphics card available for owners of PowerMacs who didn't include the 7800 upgrade with their purchase. The conundrum was that the 6600 card was dog slow with Aperture and there were no other cards available unless you could find a PC card that had been reflashed to make it into a Mac card.

This new card is specific to owners of PowerMac G5 with PCI Express (PCIe -- the serial standard), not PCI-X (PCI-Extended -- the parallel standard).

Price is $349 for the 256MB GT version. Part number is 100-435854.

Tags: Aperture, Updates

Microsoft Codename Max is dead. Whatever it was it is no more. It took me some Googling to find out:

With just a few clicks, you can create lists of your favorite photos, arrange them in the layout of your choice, and express them in beautiful views. Preview your photo lists as you build them until your presentation is perfect. You can even use our super hot 3D Mantle View to really show off your work!

A competitor to Aperture? But they have iView. A slide show application? But there are dozens of these, free, open source, Java, Flash, everything.

Maybe it was hard to find out anything because this product is not a product:

Microsoft® Codename Max is not like any other product. That's because it's not a product—it's your opportunity to try an exciting new user experience from Microsoft. Today Max lets you make lists of your photos and turn them into beautiful slide shows to share with your family and friends. Tomorrow...who knows?

With just a few clicks, you can create lists of your favorite photos, arrange them in the layout of your choice, and express them in beautiful views. Preview your photo lists as you build them until your presentation is perfect. You can even use our super hot 3D Mantle View™ to really show off your work!

Max makes it easy to share your memories with friends and family around the world. You can send any photo list to your friends so they can view the photos in your desired presentation. When you update the list, they get the new photos automatically. You just need a Microsoft Passport® network (or MSN® Hotmail) account.

Max looks and acts differently than programs you've used before. Microsoft's next-generation WinFX technology is built into Max, which allows you to create stunning visualizations of your pictures, and share and update them with your friends and family automatically.

It's proprietary, that's for sure. It does what iPhoto does with photocasting. It's a duplicate of Flickr maybe? Honestly it is hard to see what the value is here when there are so many existing solutions to this "problem". Email still works for me.

Tags: Microsoft, Pigs With Lipstick, iView, Aperture

Importing images in Aperture 1.5 is much more interesting than in 1.1. As well as dragging images and folders into the library to create managed masters, you can now rename masters on import and decide whether you want your master images to be managed or referenced. The addition of metadata presets provides the option of adding personal standard metadata to all imported images.

Importing Images From A Single Folder

To import images from a single folder (such as a camera card) I press command I to bring up the import images dialog. I navigate to my images using the browser at the top and then check all the options. Here is the interesting part of the dialog:

In this case I have elected to copy the master files into a folder called Dogs. The default is the Pictures folder in my Home folder, but I added this new folder on my disk and selected it with the Store Files pop-up. This will import the files as referenced masters and copy them to this folder, effectively doing a Relocate with copy for me after the import. The other options for the Store Files pop-up are In The Aperture Library which makes them managed and In Their Current Location which makes them referenced but does not move them.

By selecting a naming scheme for the Version name, I can change how the versions are named as they are imported. Checking the Apply to Master Filename makes this scheme do just that. My standard renaming system is shown above. I call it Version dash date because it adds the current date to the version name. This guarantees that I will get unique names when my camera counter rolls over (as it has already done).

Adding metadata can be done here as well, but I rarely do this. I prefer to import into a new project and then manipulate the metadata. On a small screen it can be hard to get to the fields, but tabbing between them works even if the scroll bar is hidden. The example above has a custom metadata field Retouch that I added in the metadata inspector panel.

On the top right of the dialog a panel shows how things will change for the selected image:

I normally elect to show an alert because I want to unmount the card. If I don't select this, then the card remains mounted and it is too easy to forget, yank it out of the reader, and then have to deal with a confused USB tree.

A nice touch is that I can also show the images in the list view:


This can be useful for sorting on camera model or other metadata that is not available from the grid view.

Adding Standard Metadata On Import

Now that Aperture supports metadata presets it is possible to use one to add standard metadata as part of the import process. But to do that you must have set one up beforehand. You cannot set up a metadata preset by going to Aperture > Presets as you would for all the other presets, but instead have to go through several steps, starting with the metadata pane (control D) in the main Aperture window.

I will set up a special metadata view that includes just the fields I want to have applied duri