1. “Vacuuming” the database made Aperture many orders of magnitude faster. I was honestly shocked when I realized how slow it had gotten. Something that took care of this occasionally would be nice.
2.  Many tasks that take a long time should be “backgroundable”. Put it in the little spinwheel dialog and make it disappear from the UI. Like exports.
3. Some tasks aren’t even cancel-able. These should also be put in the spinwheel dialog.
4. A way to rapidly add captions across many images would be nice. I believe I’ve mentioned before that I now use an applescript to do this for me, but a more polished way would be welcome.
5. Getting focus in and out of the inspector pane is painful currently.
6. Images imported from removable media are very quirky. Often the volume names are wrong and need to be reconnected immediately.
7. TAKE CARE OF DUPLICATE IMAGE IMPORTS FOR ME. Stupid to have left this off. If you don’t want to make a decision yourself, delegate it to the user.
8. Barring the option to not import duplicate images, offer the option to detect possible duplicates, both in binary and by content (resolution independent duplicate detection).
9. Make date/time adjustments the same as any other metadata adjustment. Or, in fact, make it better. Won’t upset me.
10.  Simplify the folders thing. Blue vs. Brown is confusing and undocumented at best.
11. Add output network sharing, even if it is the previews.
12. Simplify the thumbnail vs. preview vs. original differentiations and document the differences better. Default to previews off and unmaintained.
13. Making the Aperture preview library be the iPhoto library would simplify a home user’s life.
14. Publish and maintain color profiles for your book publishers, Apple. The fact that this is not done now is truly shameful. Professional level my foot.
15. Permit vaults on network shares. Not everyone wants to connect a firewire drive every night. This feature is useless to me until this is available. I’d rather back up the whole machine.
16. Don’t rebuild the projects when you restore a vault. That’s what you just told it to do – restore. It should be restored.
17. Get rid of the alert when combining keywords. It’s confusing and rather pointless.
18. Make the “you’re going to delete something” dialog more informative.
19. Help make the difference between “versions” and “masters” more obvious on the screen. For instance, if you open a project and look at all the images there, and move one to another project, you’re moving the “master” and that version. If you move an image from an album, you are only creating a version in another project for a master in this project. And yet if you go into an album and modify the version there, you are also modifying the “version” that is shown out in the top level of the project.
20. Come up with a “move” concept within projects – like the book UI’s option to only show unplaced images, but showing images not in albums instead. Rather a low priority, I learned to just create many smaller empty projects with the subfolder names I wanted and move the “primary versions” instead.
21. Let AppleScript do more. Adjusting the selection, delete versions, delete masters, vacuum the database, consolidate to my network drive, etc. I already have a smart album that is called “Delete Me”, all I’d need is something that would consolidate those masters, and then delete them when I run the script. I know data loss liability there is high, but give me an option to make my home-sync easier.
22. Optical media output. C’mon. It’s cheap and relatively painless to put a snapshot of a project on CDs/DVDs and then shoebox it.
23. I realize this is an outside type of request, but exporting images to panorama software is goofy because the external editor application setting is designed around exporting one image at a time. Multiple image export to external editors would help this kind of thing.

I still love Aperture, but this kind of thing would make it oh so much easier to manage.

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.

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.

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.

One advantage was that I was home and during my waking hours I was able to get to the photos marked “Edit”. I corrected about 600 white balance issues, some low-degree rotation fixes, converted some really bad color screwups to B/W, and took that off my todo list. I’m about a year of pictures away from being current, and I’m looking forward to the bus ride tomorrow, where I’ll probably get most of that done. I’m still in my ratings run. I also did a small number of mosaic-panoramas taken before I had my panorama head. Some turned out much better than previous attempts to stitch; the change in panoramic stitching software over the years is quite visible.

I did try doing month-to-month rating instead of full-year, and I’m not sold on either. The month-to-month effort interrupts me too often, but I can tell clearly where I left off. I think for the remainder I’ll go back to yearlong rating.

1. Keep, but flawed deeply – out of focus, exposure wrong, etc.
2. Flawed.
3. Acceptable.
4. Special.
5. 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 just aren’t worth it at all. The theory is that you go through each shoot one picture at a time, do your comparisons, and rate each picture as you go. I bring this up because this system works for my current photos – photos in maintenance mode. For doing the retro-tag and rate of 45,000 images, I had to modify this a bit.As with so many things, I’m doing it in multiple passes so only one pass is long.  So for each year, I’m doing one pass that is nothing more than “assign which ones I’m going to even consider printing”. Note I do these with only the thumbnail viewer – not the “full picture” viewer turned on. This is so I can quickly burn through this first pass. These get their first star. I do it this way because I can flatly reject entire runs of photos (shoots for friends, church events, testing camera equipment shots, things that aren’t as interesting as they were when I shot them, etc.).The next phase is to show a query of all the one-star photos (somewhere around 3/5 of the full project typically), then start rating them. This run is to boil out the 1-3s. Keeping in mind this is for me to make prints for a personal book, I turn on the viewer and start going through them and do glance-judgments – no long studying this round – of whether it stays a 1, goes in the “better but still bad” 2, or “this is pretty good” 3. Once I did try combining everything up to this point into one pass (reject through 3 in one go) and that worked well enough as well. Adjust to taste.The next query I do is not the 2s, but straight to the 3s. This is where it starts getting serious. Now I do 2 more passes. The first pass on the 3s is to increment anything that is just plain better. This is the first pass where I’ll pull out the loupe and look at focus and so on. Then I repeate this process on the new 4s, which leaves me with the spread I’m looking for. The 5s in my collection typically amount to less than 5%, which makes for a pretty decent count in a family-type journal book, and if I find I want to show more pictures for particular event or month, I open up the 4s and drop in a few more. We’ll see if I make any refinements, but I’ve done this with 1998-2002 so far and I rather like it. It takes a long while, but the good get sifted upward and I have had no less than 4 chances to pick each. If I’ve picked a picture 3 or more times for incrementing, it is probably safe to put in a book.  

I was able to finish my smaller runs of tagging (description) and get to the point that I will need to start the ratings and captions. This morning I got mostly through the Edit batch, and will probably finish on the ride home. The rating and caption thing is going to be long, and probably hard. This is because Aperture isn’t really designed to make captioning across many images easy. For instance if I want to type in the caption, consider myself done and move to the next picture, I have to leave the keyboard and go to the mouse to select the next image, and then click the tiny textbox again to enter the next caption. I’m REALLY not looking forward to this. In fact, this might be my main motivation to finally learn AppleScript which would let me ignore the Aperture UI and do it a bit faster. We’ll see.

The remaining library portions – scanned negatives and scanned prints – still need to be tagged. I’ve only sorted them into time periods in my life (school, college, post-college, wedding, just-married). The problem is that there are still way too many duplicates in that section for my taste – sometimes you keep double-prints plus the negative, meaning 3 images in my library that are all the same. It’s annoying to contain that kind of thing, but it has to be done for me to feel done with this. Eventually I’ll need to move this library to “the next library app” and I’d like to have all the duplicate issues worked out before I get there.

1. Wide categories. Family, friends, trips, home, work, events, car, edit.
2. Immediate family. (I’ve already done this pass, but oh well.)
3. Extended family. This will probably end up as two to three passes on its own, but the number of pictures will get smaller each time.
4. Trips/daytrips/locations. Beach, San Francisco, Monterey, New York, Houston, etc.
5. Events. Birthday, Graduation, Camp, San Jose Auto Show, Thanksgiving, Easter, Christmas, etc.
6. Work/Home locations. Specific jobs, which house.

So far I like it. It lets me select great swaths of photos and lump them into categories I will sort through at a later time, ending up with smaller and smaller piles. Another thing I plan on doing is removing the outer category (Family) once I tag the specific names, so I can then do the Family query again to find just the pictures without names yet.