Why didn’t anyone tell me…

As you can see, I use Aperture quite a bit. As with anything you use on a regular basis, you learn its ins and outs and start thinking about how you’d like it to be better.

“Vacuuming” the database made Aperture many orders of magnitude faster. I was honestly shocked when I realized how slow it [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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Well, I’ve done it. All the images are tagged, rated, captioned, and ready for export. What a mess. For the (probably nobody) listening, this has been an immense effort, and I’m glad I don’t have to do it ever again. The topic of creating books or web pages for these images is a whole other [...]

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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 [...]

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Yikes. I finished tagging and rating all my photos. I thing I’ll do a debreifing soon, but it’s amazing to think that I’ve finished everything but the captions.

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I generally survive the week on 5 hours sleep. Well, it caught up to me. I spent the weekend with a very minor headcold the could probably be written off to allergies. The wind was howling, the air turned dry, but the rain the previous week could be generating mold. There’s just no telling. Either [...]

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I once read how one person did the ratings on their photos, in a way I rather like. It went like so:

Keep, but flawed deeply – out of focus, exposure wrong, etc.
Flawed.
Acceptable.
Special.
Something you’d frame or sell.

And of course with modern software you usually have a “reject” or “delete me later” category for those things that [...]

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I’m now reaching the very end of my tagging for digital photos. I started digital photography in 1998, well before it was ready to be started in reality. Here I am with my monstrous collection of photos now, and managing that collection is a bear. Over the weekend I was able to finish the tagging [...]

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One of the things about Aperture is the tagging is flexible. One of the things I like about their method is you can hot-key a set of up to 8 keywords and assign them with an option-3 or similar keypress. But this means you probably want to limit the number of things you’re assigning keywords [...]

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