App: Apple Aperture

I’m very excited to announce that along with Frederick Van Johnson, host of TWiP (This Week in Photography podcast), we’ll be hosting the first TWiP Weekend Workshop to be held in Joshua Tree, CA!

I’m about to start on the last chapter in my new eBook, entirely titled “The ApertureExpert’s In-Depth Getting Started with Aperture 2 – a beginner’s guide”. Here’s the introduction…

Over many years of working with Aperture, and helping other people with Aperture, I’ve noticed one very common trend—no matter how much they love Aperture now, most people had a hard time getting started. This guide is designed to get you on your way. It doesn’t really matter too much where you’re coming from to use this guide; be it any other photo management application or none at all. This guide aims to get you moving efficiently, and possibly more importantly, to set the stage for a lot more learning. There are loads of free videos on apple.com that show you the basic of basics—I’m more interested in getting you started with a very solid understanding of what your choices are. So while some of the basic instructions like “Importing Your First Photos” takes up a seemingly bizarre six pages, after reading it you’ll truly understand what’s happening to your photos and what options you have.

Apple released a new iPhone/iPod Touch app this morning called “MobileMe Gallery” [iTunes link], which allows you to view not only your own MobileMe Gallery on your iPhone, but also those of friends and family by simply adding them as contacts. I’d say Apple’s a little late to the game with image sharing using iPhone app’s, but as is expected from Apple it’s a really nice implementation. It might even get me to start using my MobileMe account for photos again!

So why is this of interest to Aperture users? One of the great things about carrying an iPhone or iPod Touch as a photographer is it’s an easy way to show off your photos to others—friends and family, or more importantly, to potential clients. I’ve always advised keeping a reasonably sized collection of images in a “portfolio” album in Aperture, and syncing that to your iPhone so you can always have an up-to-date portfolio in your pocket. But the fact remains that to update your portfolio on your iPhone, you have to physically sync your iPhone to your computer to do it. Since the introduction of over-the-air syncing for contacts and calendars quite some time ago, I’d wager that most people don’t physically connect their iPhone to their computer all that often anymore—leaving that portfolio potentially woefully out of date. Further, for a lot of pro’s (myself included), the “iTunes computer” my not be the same system that Aperture is on. Which means not only do you have to physically connect your iPhone to your iTunes computer to sync, but you also have to manually copy files from your Aperture system to your iTunes system. Way too many steps, which leaves yourself open to having an out-of-date portfolio in your pocket.