Tips

There are a lot of Olympus PEN E-P1 and E-P2 photographers who user Aperture, and many have been frustrated by the lack of RAW support from Apple. I actually bailed on RAW shooting on mine and decided that as a point-and-shoot, JPEG was just fine for me, but hey that’s me. There’s obviously a lot of folks who want RAW support.

A buddy of mine in Paris emailed me this morning asking if I’d test out an Applescript he wrote that changes a header in the ORF file to trick Aperture into thinking the E-P1 ORF file is actually from an E-30. This mens that Aperture treats the file as an E-30 file, so the RAW conversion hasn’t been tweaked specifically for the E-P1, but the end result is it DOES allow you to read the native RAW file.

His script went up for sale for just €5 today. Here’s a quick look at it, and a link to his store is at the end.

The rumor mill is in full force, and other than the infamous rumored tablet (iTablet, iSlate, iWantOne), the other hot rumor for Apple’s Wednesday event is Aperture 3. Don’t ask me if it’s true, I honestly haven’t got a clue (and believe you me, I’ve tried to get one!!). So let’s assume that it does come… what do we want to see?

One of the reasons we shoot pictures is to share our memories. And in Aperture, it’s incredibly easy to share your photos in a variety of ways; one of the simplest is through email.

The most obvious way to email a picture is by selecting one or many photos, and clicking on the Email icon. That’s fine if you know exactly what you want to send before you click the button. But sometimes you want to add a few photos, then add a few more, then add a few more, then realize that you’ve added so many that the email has gotten huge and you really should send these smaller. Dang.

There is a way to handle this that’s very, very flexible.

Once your Aperture library crosses the 10,000 image mark, you will likely pause to wonder if you’re going to run out of space any time soon. You may have already looked at the size of the Aperture Library file in the Pictures folder, and thought “whoah… 150GB… so that’s why I’m outta space”. But wait, you’re working referenced; all those massive RAW files are on an external drive, how is this even possible?!

Previews. Aperture 1.5 introduced a series of amazing features that allowed you to carry around an enormous number of photos on a single computer, while at the same time leaving your RAW files on other drives, and still letting you share those photos throughout the OS. They way it handles this magic is through JPEG Previews and XML.

Understanding how this works will allow you to control the size of your library and relcaim 10’s – or even 100’s! – of GB’s back.