(If you’re just joining us, start with Tip 1)

(If you’re just joining us, start with Tip 1)

Tiny tip for today, but it can be a helpful one if you aren’t aware of this.

In the Aperture preferences, you can enable an option to “Show numbers of versions for projects and albums”. You’ll find it under the Appearance tab.

“Show number of versions for projects and albums” option in Aperture’s preferences

This is a simple thing, but it means that when you’re looking at your Library list, you can immediately see how many photos are in each Project or Album. If you need 10 selected photos for a client or job or blog post or whatever, you can glance at that Album you’re adding photos into and see how many are there instantly. When looking for “that big collection of photos I shot at that thing but didn’t label properly”, seeing 300 photos in one and 2 in another is a pretty good indicator. When scanning your library for massive Projects that really should be broken up into more than one, or tiny projects that really should be merged (do I really need a project with 2 photos in it? No.), this is great info to have at a glance.

That image count can come in very handy

But notice that it does not give you an image count for a Folder. Why is that?

[There’s an important update to this at the end… be sure to read all the way through, and to read the comments as well — particularly those by Butch Miller.]

Aperture has built-in support for flickr and Facebook, but sometimes that just doesn’t cut it for you. Or you may simply need to upload a photo to a service that isn’t built in; it doesn’t matter which, there are dozens (hundreds?) of places and reasons to push your photos.

For those of you with iPhoto on the iPad, you may have played with the Journal feature. It’s quite a neat way to display photos, although it’s very isolated. Once published there’s no discovery infrastructure like on Flickr, and other than emailing the URL to people or manually tweeting/facebooking it, there really isn’t a great way to get it seen.

All that said, that doesn’t mean it isn’t cool ;-)

In this entry I’ll cover how to get your Aperture-treated photos into iPhoto for iOS, then what to do once you’ve created the Journal. I’m not going to get into how to actually make the journal itself. I may do that another time.

Here’s the end result… click the screenshot to be taken to the real gallery (just be sure to come back here!).

Click to view the iPhoto for iOS generated Journal gallery

Pretty cool, isn’t it? Yeah I thought so too! The images are really large, so if you tap on one to open it, and then click the arrows to go full screen, since these are 2048 wide images, not only do they look perfect on the new iPad, they even look great full screen on a 27” iMac (2560 wide). 

This is a question we hear a lot on ApertureExpert (especially when really hot cameras like the Canon EOS 5D Mk III are released—support added yesterday, by the way), so I put together a FAQ to answer the question as clearly as possible, and to offer some alternatives while you’re waiting.

Apple is getting into the habit of releasing Camera RAW updates for one camera at a time it seems… before this was the Nikon D800, and now with version 3.12, a single new camera is supported — The Canon EOS 5D Mark III.

Michael Ball has posted a great and detailed tip in the User Tips section on understanding the metadata autofill lists. Be sure to check that out: Some Tips for the Metadata Autofill List.

There’s an outstanding issue with Aperture that seems to come and go, but I’ve seen multiple reports on it since the 3.2.3 update so it appears to be back with a vengeance. The problem is when you use an external editor (i.e. Photoshop) or even a plug-in (i.e. Nik’s plugins) and round-trip back to Aperture, the thumbnail itself updates to reflect the changes you’ve made, but the image in the Viewer does not (that’s the big version of the photo you’re looking at).

Did you know that you can move and even rename your Photo Stream projects, and Aperture will still find them and continue to automatically import the photos?

Set the Preferences

If you have your Preferences set to automatically import your Photo Stream photos…

Aperture 3 Photo Stream Preferences set to automatically import photos

Then the photos are automatically imported into a project named “Month year Photo Stream”, like this:

Sounds like a small thing, but this is a big deal for Aperture users wanting to use Nik Software’s Snapseed in their workflow. Now that it has a proper Save command, and not just Save As…, this means that you can use Snapseed as an external editor in Aperture, just like you can use Photoshop.