Aperture

I picked up a Aperture on Monday.

Wow. No, like, Wow. Aperture is just a really cool piece of software.

I’m coming from iPhoto and am not a professional photographer. Honestly, I have no idea what tools the ‘industry’ might use beyond having been tortured by the extreme depths of suckitude rendered by the “pro” tools that Canon shipped with the Digital Rebel.

I find Aperture to be easy to use, but I fully comprehend that I’m far from masting the application and mastery will require considerable effort and regular use. I’m using Aperture on my powerbook which, coincidentally, happens to be the minimum configuration supported by Aperture. It works amazingly well; generally responsive and the image manipulation features are spiffy fast. There are certain tasks that I can perform that will dog it out, but nothing I’m doing regularly makes the app completely unresponsive for a long time.

When importing an iPhoto library, I wish there was a way to only import the original photos from iPhoto. As it is, any photo that was edited in iPhoto shows up as two versions in Aperture. Conveniently, one is tagged ‘iPhoto Original’ and one is ‘iPhoto Edited’. It is easy enough to set up a smart album that looks for the ‘iPhoto Edited’ tag such that I can delete the edited versions. Easy enough, but an only import the original checkbox would save a bunch of time.

My biggest challenge is of my own creation. How the hell do I organize all my photos? I started to create a series of projects containing folders and albums; one project for flowers with species contained in albums, one project for pinball with machine specific albums, etc…

But I don’t really consider these things to be projects. They are really just a part of the library of photos I have built up. The alternative is to tag everything. Certainly, tagging is all the rage these days and, frankly, doing so would make some sense. The challenge with tagging is to figure out some kind of a namespace that is both consistent and memorable.

At the same time, a master image must reside in at least one album in one project. Therefore, I actually do need to have some kind of project/folder/album containment hierarchy.

So, it appears that having a formal project/folder/album hierarchy is the way to go. Now, do I have a single top level project named “archive” into which I organize all the photos into folders/albums? Or does it make more sense to have a number of top level projects?

As I’m often discovering, the Aperture team gave a lot of thought to rendering an application where the user can take ownership of the workflow comfortably. In thinking this through, I was worried that having a slew of projects would lead to losing projects in a long list. Aperture provides both a Recent Projects and a Favorite Projects selection that nicely prevents that.

So much to learn….

This entry was posted on Friday, December 9th, 2005 at 11:58 am and is filed under Mac OS X, Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.