App: Apple Aperture

I’ve been playing with Places a lot lately (one of my favorite new features; I can’t wait to get 13 years of digital photos onto my map!) and in doing so have been figuring out the fastest way to do that. Of course I don’t have geodata for all these old photos, so this means just using the Places feature to assign a general location (i.e. Santa Monica Pier) to groups of pictures.

If all the photos in a project are in one location, it’s really easy to do. But when you have a few different locations in one project, it can get a little trickier. I tried doing it in the metadata inspector (oops, you can’t do batch locations there), and dragging things on the map (but that can get tedious finding those spots), and finally realized that as you would expect, Apple’s made it really easy to do… you just have to click in the right place.

That’s a shock… the 17,000+ image Aperture 2 Library I’ve imported into a clean Aperture 3 Library was 21.27 GB originally (without Previews). It’s now only 16.65 GB. That’s a nice surprise! I’ve already run Faces on it (big mistake… running Faces on a concert series; hellloooo audience!!! Talk about a chore rejecting all those unknown people! LOL), and have upgrade about 2/3 of the Library to the new processing engine.

One of the features I was hoping for the most in Aperture 3 was Faces. OK, I’ve probably said that already about most of the new features in Aperture 3, but come on… it’s a great upgrade!!

I’ve put the library update on hold so I could play with a few things in Aperture tonight. I created a new library and imported a few hundred iPhone photos. Perhaps not the easiest thing for Faces to deal with, since these are pretty low resolution and of dubious quality, but hey, it’s what was handy… and, they have GPS data for Places, too. Sweet.

A note: The following is a result of me writing this entry as I go. It’s NOT a cleaned-up, “how to use Faces” entry. So come along for the ride… maybe we’ll all learn a thing or two!

So with a whole 30 minutes to spare, I’ve finally begun my own move to Aperture 3. I took one of my client libraries and am starting with that. The fortunate thing of being forced to wait this week is I have the benefit of learning what has and hasn’t worked for other people. While this particular library is quite small (only 17,398 photos), I wanted to take the extreme-caution route. Here’s what I’m doing for this upgrade.