Why didn’t anyone tell me…

So I finally got the tagging completed, the rating completed, and the database of 32,000 some finished images (after I pulled out all the QTVR source files and duplicates) is ready to do something with it. What to do, what to do.

The first thing that came to mind was to post these things online. So I immediatly set about exporting the 4s and 5s and copying them to my personal web engine (I don’t use the static HTML thing they export). I then thought it was time I got those books started that I’ve always been meaning to do. Keep in mind I have around 5000 4-5 star images that could go in there.

The creation of the books caused me some distress. Posts in the Aperture Book info forums were berating the books quality, saying you should increase the saturation, the print quality was low, etc. By sifting a couple dozen of these, I discovered most of the complaints were out of the U.S. The people with clearly U.S. identification (I’m here in Vermont… etc.) glowed over the quality. So I decided on a compromise. The first trial book is for Christmas. Each of our kids is getting a 100 page book with the three boys in it. 40 pages of the oldest, 40 pages of the middle, and 20 pages of the baby. This will let me get a feel for the quality and what adjustments should be made before I jump in on the much larger project of laying out and printing the entire family history.

First of all, book layouts in Aperture are not really designed around the Home Journal kind of thing by default. The layout I decided fitted best was the Stock Book, replacing each of the Notes fields with the Caption field instead. Most of the books are designed around the coffee-table type of book. A noble design effort, but I’d like to see more in the Archive with Keywords and Captions kind of thing. Maybe I’m supposed to look at iPhoto for that, but I can’t stand that thing.

By the way, the documentation from the Aperture manual had a good tip I didn’t notice the first time through. If you lay out your book first, as in how you want the pages to look, then afterward arrange the pictures in the thumbnail viewer in the correct order, you can just have it dump them in insead of manually placing each. It also let me figure out groupings and “this one left, that one right” things without having to remanipulate the page layouts as well. Thanks docs team!

Anyway, I await the delivery of the 3 pack of books happily.