Why didn’t anyone tell me…

I’m doing more negative tagging within Aperture, this time it’s for my pre-digital days. The quality varies greatly from project to project, some being bad JPG scans of prints for which I have no negatives, some being medium format scans from a Nikon CoolScan 8000 (which I highly suggest), some being 35mm scans from either the ‘8000 or the Coolscan 5000. I’m doing the same  kind of tagging and organizing with these that I did with my digital photos (see the Aperture category). I have gotten used to it and I’m not really willing to retrain myself for this little project. The one thing I do want to do when I can figure things out is put approximate dates back in the images. This might involve Timeature or Bridge, but that’s quite a bit downstream. I’m done with the big tagging effort, this is just a final touch. I still have to pull out the old photo albums and scan those prints before I consider the digital albums done, but that’s a LONG way out.

So back to the original point. Aperture as an organization system is quite nice. I say this because I can catalog the entire thing while offline (bus), do the organizing, tag what files need edits, and then do just those when I’m online (home). I like my current worflow. I can’t wait for the days when face recognition puts hand-tagging people out of the picture, but I can wait for now.

Correcting color cast is pretty good with most pictures. Once I get an image in, I can white-balance with the sampling tool for most images. If a run of negatives were all done in the same cast, I can do a pretty quick stamp procedure to do those and move on pretty quickly. Keywording is as easy as I want it to be. I’d love to see something that lets me do captioning on a batch basis, but I found and modified an Applescript to do that more easily. It’s not all it could be, but it’s only because we can’t get thumbnails out of Applescript. Yet.

Once I’m done with these, I think they’ll end up as a section of my web site and then get archived to the network share. I don’t really need more prints of them, and I don’t think the quality warrants bookification. Maybe if the prices came down or if I put 6-8 per page, but still it’s pricey for images I already have on paper. Time will tell.

The images I very well might have printed are the ones in medium format that my Dad took of us as kids. That might be a present for our family next year.