Saturday, August 20, 2011

Moving into Aperture

These photographs were taken today at the Kaitalampi lake, in the Luukki forests. Blueberries were still good to eat, although their leaves are starting to show autumn colors.

Thanks for the comments on how to learn to use Aperture. I have still a lot of wondering to do.

I have arranged my previous photographs into projects. Importing new photographs works fine, as well as uploading to Flickr via the FlickrExport plugin.

By the way, regarding the FlickrExport plugin, is there a way of synchronizing the captions (or names) of photographs in Aperture and Flickr?

Now I have to given names in the plugin - Aperture filenames are not used there. It would be nice to be able to name the photographs in such a way that Aperture and Flickr names are consistent. (However, this isn't such a big deal, at least for now.)

I have learned to like Aperture adjustments - lifting and stamping them. There is a lot of new terminology to be learned!

One thing which I have been wondering about is whether there is a way of deleting all non-pick files from stacks. Namely, when I imported the iPhoto Library to Aperture, for quite a lot of photographs there were two versions, the original and the modified one, arranged into pairs (stacks).

But I would like to delete most of the originals, and preferably automatically - having hundreds of such stacks (mostly pairs of photograhps), it is not an easy thing to go through all the photographs, selecting the originals from the stacks and then deleting them.

I found a couple of tutorials which were useful in the beginning: one at PhotoRadar and one written by - of all people - Ken Rockwell. However, both are rather technical and sporadic, and don't really help in arranging the workflow in Aperture as smoothly as possible. Another good source is The Ars Review of Aperture 3.

When looking for instructions on using Aperture I noticed that Apple had published a guide titled Aperture Digital Photography Fundamentals, which is freely available as a PDF file. This guide wasn't about Aperture, though; it was an introduction to the basics of digital photography - and it was rather well written. Good for beginners.

As to the guides on Aperture, the recent book Focus On Apple Aperture: Focus on the Fundamentals by Corey Hilz seems promising. At least these two sentences describing the book are good: "Are you into photography not photomanipulation?" "Frustrated that you are spending too much time in front of the screen and not enough behind the lens?" Have you seen or read this book?

Searching for books I noticed another promising one. This is about photography, not about Aperture or any such tool: The Practice of Contemplative Photography: Seeing the World with Fresh Eyes by Andy Karr. The book title really caught my interest.

5 comments:

Christophe said...

Hi Juha,

As for non pick deletion, I would proceed as follows:

- in Library Photo view, go to Stacks menu -> open all stacks,
- go to Edit menu -> Find...
- check the "Stack picks only" checkbox at the top of the window,
- go to Edit menu -> Select All,
- go to Edit menu -> Find... and now uncheck the "Stack picks only" checkbox,
- go to Edit -> Invert selection

You now have a view of your entire library with all non stack picks selected. Feel free to do whatever you want with the selection ;-)

Christophe

Juha Haataja said...

@Christophe: Wow! Quite a recipe. This would never have occurred to me. Thanks, this helps a lot!

Christophe said...

and about the FlickrExport plugin, if I understood correctly your need, you'll have to click on the Preference button nearly at the bottom of the plugin window. In the general tab, you'll need to select "Version Name" for "Fill Flickr Title".

Another usefull trick is to check "Add Flickr ID to Aperture metadata". This enables the plugin to keep a two way track of what has been uploaded to Flickr and makes it possible to update uploaded images afterwards (either after changing metadata or changing adjustments).

Add Flickr URL can be usefull as well and won't eat your disk space at least...

It seems that you'll need to cancel and redo export->FlickrExport for the plugin Preferences changes to be effective.

Christophe

Juha Haataja said...

@Christophe: Thanks, that was exactly what I was wondering about. FlickrExport looks better and better.

As to your recipe for non-pick deletion, it worked flawlessly. Now my Aperture library is cleaned up.

Juha Haataja said...

@Christophe: Once again thanks for the hint. I found another recipe for it, which can be useful if such a thing is needed again. This one makes use of some keywords Aperture puts to the metadata when it imports iPhoto photographs.