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.

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.