App: Apple Aperture

Last week I talked about correcting time zones on import in Aperture 3, in the article “Original Photo Capture Timestamp Hidden in the Import Window”. If you were importing from multiple cameras, and some were correct but some weren’t, it’s not hard to deduce how to correct for that—import the right ones normally, then the rest using the tips in that article.

But what if you’ve already imported your photos, and suddenly find yourself with out-of-order photos in the browser, as I did yesterday after a shoot for my new book?

I was shooting with multiple cameras, and while I’m normally very good at setting the time on all cameras before a shoot, in this case I forgot one. I was shooting with five different bodies, including one from borrowlenses.com (love those guys… give ‘em some love!). I was importing in the field into the MacBook Air 11” (which performed very well for my needs in the field… I’ll write more on that another time though), and realized later that these were time stamped incorrectly.

There’s two ways to fix this… the easy way, and the hard way. How you handle this depends entirely on your file naming workflow.

A user recently asked about fixing time zones when you are importing photos that were shot in one time zone, possibly set accurately (possibly not), but while sitting in another time zone. If you find an accurate time stamp to be critical to your workflow (as many of us do), having this right is quite important.

It’s a pretty big discussion, and I will do an in-depth tip on that sooner or later, and with it include syncing GPS data (which is where things get really messy). But today while importing some photos I made while in Slovenia in October (yeah… I’m behind) I noticed something I’d never seen before.

Verifying Capture Time

The very first thing I did was to open a .CR2 file in Preview to check out the EXIF data and see what time it had set. I know for a fact that my camera was set correctly, so before I even went into Aperture (expecting to have some time zone confusion), I verified the time.

As you can see, the image was captured on October 12, 2010, at 17:51:48

Now what?

A kb (knowledge base) article was released explaining in much more detail what was fixed in the recent Aperture 3.1.1 update. No huge surprises here personally (many of these fixes were things I never knew were broken), but worth a read if you’ve discovered some bizarre activity in Aperture and are curious if it’s been fixed, or just to get more details on the iLife, Flickr, etc. updates.

I’ve been lusting after a new MacBook Air since they were released, but have been waiting to see what the reviews said for performance. After all, it’s (just) a Core 2 Duo processor, and even at the top-end, significantly lower specced than my 2.93Ghz 15” MacBook Pro from early 2009. But the hope of course was that with a more modern graphics card, the SSD “hard drive”, and some wishful thinking, that it could still stand up as an Aperture machine.