JPEGmini is an app that does one thing — it re-compresses your JPEGs into smaller JPEGs, with virtually no quality loss. In this post, we look at the viability of applying this to your entire Aperture library as a way to reduce the footprint of your JPEG previews, and therefore your entire Aperture library.

Why buck tradition… it seems every other store in America is having a sale today, so why not ApertureExpert, as well?

to get 25% off

PresidentsDay2013 code on checkout

This code is good through the middle of tomorrow (2/19/2013 @ 12 noon MST, to be precise) so don’t delay!

I had heard about this on twitter, but not seen it myself until today. I was opening images to edit in various plugins when out of nowhere, this dialog started popping up:

Aperture says: This image cannot be rendered for editing because Aperture does not support the image format. Say whaaa?

Recently I was introduced to a backup application called Arq, by Haystack Software. This is a $29 app that gives you a clean interface to Amazon’s S3 or Glacier servers, allowing you to use Amazon as a backup service. Since Glacier is only $.01 per GB per month (about $10 per TB), it’s a pretty good deal. There are initial upload and then retrieval charges to consider as well, but the peace of mind of online/cloud backup is hard to put a price on.

Granted, you can buy a 3TB USB 3 hard drive today for just $130 [Amazon.com link] and ship that to a friend on the other side of the country for safe keeping, but by now I think we all know the advantages of automated, offsite backup.

Backup Bouncer Test

Anyway, this article isn’t about Arq or Glacier. It’s about a disturbing statement I read on the Haystack website, which I immediately challenged Backblaze on. As you know I’m a huge supporter of Backblaze (having written a very popular post on the topic “Cloud Backup; Backblaze in the Real World” last year), so seeing anything negative about a service I rely on is sure to get my hackles up!

The statement in question is under the header “Accuracy”, around the middle of the Arq info page. It states that Backblaze failed 19 out of 20 tests using a test suite called “Backup Bouncer”. In fact, the list goes on to show that Carbonite failed 20 out of 20, Dropbox failed 19 of 20, and so-on. Disturbing numbers, to say the least!

In complete fairness to Haystack Software, the folks who wrote this article, they did state “What do these results mean? For most scenarios, probably nothing. Any of those backup apps can restore your file contents — photos, Office docs, music files. You’ll still be able to view your restored photos, edit your restored Office docs, play your restored music. But the dates on the files might not be correct, for instance.” But regardless; 19 out of 20 failures does not instill confidence.

Backblaze’s response

So naturally, I asked Backblaze, and am quoting their response below.[more]

ShootDotEdit introduced their Aperture workflow about a year ago, first discussed on ApertureExpert here; “ShootDotEdit Now Offers an Aperture Workflow”. I was very excited about this at the time, because ShootDotEdit were the first to offer their professional photo editing services customized for Aperture users. Basically, if you shoot big events like weddings and don’t want to do the heavy lifting for the photo edit yourself, you can outsource that to SDE. At first launch though, they did not include their “cull” service for Aperture users, which meant you still had to at least do the initial edit on your own.

However, that is no longer the case![more]

Aperture Inspector has been upgraded to version 1.5. This is a free update to all existing owners.

Session 24 is available now! This is all about understanding image resolution — no matter what image editor you use.

The free version of the video is embedded below, or if you prefer and can afford to support us, please buy the full HD 1920 × 1080 version for just $2!

There will be an all-new Live Training tonight, February 9th 2013 at 7pm PST. For more details, go here.

Hi folks,

Not much to report lately in the realm of Aperture but there is a new RAW update today, coming in at 4.04 and covering a handful of new cameras, including:

Hi ApertureExperters!

There’s a video version of this tip! I know you guys love those, so I’ll try to do more of them. It’s at the very end of this post.

For better or for worse, I’ve been using Facebook to share photos more lately. However not necessarily publicly, but privately. Really it was a rash of holiday parties that got me looking for a good solution to publishing photos privately on Facebook directly from Aperture.

The challenge is, when you create a new Facebook album in Aperture, you don’t have the option to make it private.

Facebook albums created in Aperture can’t be made private

So the solution is quite simple, if not a little tedious. Basically, you create the private album on facebook.com first, then add your photos to that album from Aperture. Of course there are a few steps along the way, and that’s what this post is all about.[more]

Hey folks! It’s time for another new training workshop. This one is an addendum to the very popular 4+ hour “Work Like a Pro Photographer in Aperture 3” workshop. It’s all about the big changes in Aperture 3.3 and 3.4, including explanations of the Unified Library, the enhanced White Balance tool, Auto Enhance, Photo Stream and Shared Photo Stream, and more.

Those of us that have iPads know that they are a fantastic way to show off your favorite photos, wether it’s to a potential client or to grandma over the holidays. The problem is, syncing your photos to your iPad can be a bit of a chore. We’ve gone through loads of different options and ways to do this, which gets especially complicated when managing multiple libraries, but I recently realized that there’s a much better solution to this.

Hi all,

For those of you on G+ (and I’m sure that’s a lot of you!) I’ve opened an ApertureExpert community there. I’m honestly not sure what to do with it, as I do like keeping the support forum here on ApertureExpert, but part of me thinks it’s a good idea to have that one running, too. Maybe it’s a bad idea though, and I’m open to suggestions!