App: Apple Aperture

Aperture’s standard layout works just fine for most people, however there may be times when you’d like to tweak things a little bit for your own workflow. It could be that you want to hide panes to maximize screen real estate, or maybe the image you’re currently working on gets bigger when you move the Browser, or perhaps it just makes more sense to you to see Inspector on the right.

The most common and well-known UI (User Interface) customization would be the Browser / Split View / Viewer toggle. These three views, rotated through by simply tapping the V key, allow you to see just the Browser (thumbnails or list view), both the Browser and the Viewer in Split View, or just the Viewer. I say these are the most well known simply because there are buttons in the toolbar to flip through these, so chances are high you’ve figured this one out.

But there’s much more you can do.

Rotate and swap the Browser

There are four different places the Browser can live. On the bottom, the left, the top, or the right of the Viewer. There are two commands to control this; View > Browser > Swap Position (⌥W)  and View > Browser > Rotate Position (⇧W). Through a combination of these, here are the four possible layouts:

The four positions of the Browser (tap to view larger)

You can resize the Browser by grabbing the bar between the Browser and the Viewer as well. Depending on which Browser view you are in (Filmstrip, Grid or List), the thumbnails will resize or you’ll see more photos at once.

Swap the Inspector

The Inspector, which is the pane normally on the left that houses the Library, Metadata and Adjustments tabs, can be moved from left to right by choosing View > Inspector > Swap Position (⇧I). This won’t free up any space but it may make more sense to you visually.

Check out this piece of ancient history I found in my office…

Hey grandpa, what is this thing?

An old Kodak Photo CD. Chrome scans from 1995. Wow. When I inserted the CD, iPhoto automatically launched and offered to import. I quit it and launched Aperture, but guess what… Aperture doesn’t import these things. So if you have any laying around, import ‘em quick using iPhoto!

So I imported the lot into iPhoto, and chose Reveal in Finder to locate the originals, which surprisingly opened the iPhoto Library package to show me the files. Interesting. So I copied those out to import into Aperture.

As you probably know by now, my file naming convention contains the yyyy-mm-dd_hh-mm-ss of the image capture, but as it goes without saying, these photos don’t have valid date and time stamps. In fact the stamp they have is from the moment of import off the Photo CD. But that’s OK, I have a nice little workaround for changing the dates on photos and building it into the file name. It’s my double-import trick.

Double-import to correct date & time stamps

Here’s what you can do in a situation where you have images with known incorrect time stamps that you want to correct prior to import, so ultimately the file names can have accurate date info in them.

1. Import the photos to Aperture as Referenced. Leave them in the original location, and don’t change the names. This import goes extremely quick since Aperture is just making a reference to the file, and not moving or copying it. In fact the fastest way to do this is to simply command-option drag the photos into an empty Project. This imports as referenced and leaves them where they are (same key-combo to drag-create an alias in the Finder).

500px.com is fast becoming an extremely popular website for sharing your best work. I think one of the big differentiators between 500px and anything else out there is that you’re encouraged to only share your best images here. Lately though I have stumbled upon a few collections where users treated it more like Flickr, uploading 20 similar photos, and that may be the fault of 500px’s new pricing strategy. Even though I’m not a big user of 500px myself (I only recently started uploading photos to it), I hope it can stay true to its roots and focus on great photography, not mass consumption of every “it’s in focus so it must be good enough” photo out there.

An Aperture Plugin for 500px

500-wide is a new Aperture plugin from Blue Crowbar Software that honors the original idea of 500px — it’s only for your best. I say this because the plugin only allows you to upload a single image at a time. While I was originally resistant to this idea, I have come to appreciate it’s simplicity. When the plugin restricts you to selecting a single shot to share, it’s telling you to really focus and pick only your best. It does mean that when you’re first uploading your portfolio-quality images you’re probably going to skip the plugin and use the 500px web interface, but that’s fine. When you get into the routine of sharing just your best shots here and there, the plugin works perfectly fine.

Once installed, the plugin is found with the rest of your export options under the File > Export menu. The interface is pure and simple.

The upload interface for Blue Crowbar’s 500-wide Aperture plugin for 500px.com

The title is taken from the Title IPTC tag, which I don’t believe is very widely used. Most users may be expecting the title to be pulled from the Aperture Version Name tag, as it is for most image sharing services, however once again I appreciate this step. I don’t like changing my Version Names to anything other than the original Master Name, with perhaps a unique identifier at the end. This allows me to have a Title and my separate Version Name and never the two shall meet. The Description field is pulled from the IPTC Caption, as expected.