Why didn’t anyone tell me…

Aperture is clearly designed well around the digital photographer. There’s always room for improvement, but I became so accustomed to the workflow and environment that I decided to use it to organize my digital conversions of 35mm negatives.

Here’s what attracted me to the idea:

• Easy keywording. I just like the way it’s done in Aperture.
• Easy to publish to static HTML.
• Most common tools in the thumbnail viewer (or that quick trip into View mode)
• Easy to handle the flow of it – do the project, export it, and be done.
• Easy to query.

There were a number of things that nobody told me:

• Unable to alter dates of photos. Eventually I learned to do this in Bridge and then import them to Aperture for everything else.
• Most distinguising charactersitcs of digital photos are not available in scanned negatives (no surprise, but limiting). Nikon software tags the image with the name of the scanner and the scan date/time.
• Original folder associations are done away with once they are imported. So if you took a lot of time to scan roll 1 into a roll 1 folder? Make sure you import folders as albums. Learned that the hard way.
• Black and White JPEG mode is actually supported in Aperture, but it has to generate a full preview. Takes more time before you can see a thumbnail.
• Captions can’t be batch applied. You have to caption one image, lift, remove everything from the stamp EXCEPT your caption, then select multiple, THEN stamp selected. Far too much work.

This isn’t to say it did a bad job, but Bridge was definitely my tool of choice for prep work, and then import to Aperture, keyword, publish, and archive.

Bridge was nice in a number of ways, it was easy to mass-caption, allowed me to edit dates (assign a date in batches, specifically), and respected my original folder structure until I could tag the dates or other associations into the files. But clearly after that was done, I wanted to do the rest in Aperture.