Away to Me

I just installed Aperture 2.0 and what a difference! Things work MUCH faster, especially in Quick Preview mode. It is a much simpler design than 1.5 and seems like it would be very easy for new users to learn to use.

Using the non-custom installation results in about 3 GB of sample high resolution images to be placed on your hard drive. The user manual uses these images as a teaching tool to guide newcomers through the basics of Aperture. Anyone who has used it before will want to delete these images so they don’t take up so much disk space.

Aperture 2.0 provided support for the Canon Powershot G9 without me having to upgrade to Leopard yet. So, finally, I can verify that the hiking trail down from the Schilthorn in Switzerland was indeed as steep and narrow as I recall it being.

Finally, I am ready to update my computer to Leopard and Aperture 2. What makes me ready now, is that I have settled on a library structure that ensures that I know where all the images I want to access are, and that they are backed up in at least two separate drives.

Before Aperture, our family had an iMac with iPhoto and a few thousand photos from the past several years. We got our daughter a Macbook for graduation that her photos went on. I purchased a Macbook Pro and Aperture last June and began importing new photos into Aperture. Due to a lot of travel, I didn’t get to spend as much time seeing how I wanted to organize my images, until recently. As a result, some images were scattered over several computers and hard drives and it was nearly impossible to tell what had been backed up and what hadn’t until I finally got them organized into one library.

I originally thought I would create separate libraries for my husband, our daughter and me. The problem with that came about when I wanted to see all of our images from a certain trip to choose the ones to print.

The second idea was to have one primary library residing on my Macbook Pro and keep all the images as referenced images with the masters stored on an external hard drive in folders. This would allow me to see all of the images wherever I took my computer and would allow rating and metadata changes to happen, but not editing without reconnecting to the external hard drive. That idea did not allow for the masters to be backed up by the Aperture vault system.

I recently settled on making a Master Aperture Library that resides on an external hard drive and that consists of all of our photos. A Working Aperture Library sits on my Macbook Pro. When we return from a trip, I import the images into the Working Aperture Library and add keywords, ratings, and other metadata as needed. The new trip project is then imported into the Master Aperture Library where anyone in our family can go to access their images.

The third Aperture library that I have consists of the images I pulled out of my parents’ iPhoto library. Like many people I know, they’ve gotten a computer and a digital camera, but no plan for backing up their computer. I took an external hard drive to their house, copied their iPhoto library on it and imported it into an Aperture library. Not only am I able to ensure that their images are safe, I can now surprise them with a custom book of their recent trips.

My Master Aperture Library is approximately 60 GB in size. It has functioned well so far due to breaking the library into folders with smaller projects underneath them. With Quick Preview in Aperture 2, it should be very fast to work in the Master Library.

Aperture is designated as a pro application by Apple, but amateur photographers will find many reasons to embrace it as a solution to managing burgeoning image libraries. As one of those amateurs who has found Aperture to be invaluable, in up-coming posts I’ll share how it can bring order to the chaos of images that plagues many amateur photographers.

I have been a film photographer until a year ago. The darkroom in my house accommodates developing and printing up to 4×5 negatives. Managing my negatives is a relatively simple feat. They are kept in archival sleeves with developing and printing information attached and stored either off-site or in a fire-proof safe.

When our family ventured into digital photography, the key concern for me was backing up and archiving images in a way that makes them accessible in the future. iPhoto does a decent job of organizing images with its “Events” and albums, but lacks an incremental backup without Time Machine. The original feature that sold me on Aperture was the “Vault” capability. Vaults are an incremental backup of your Aperture library that can be used to restore your library in the event of a hard drive failure, etc. For those who are paranoid, like me, you can have multiple vaults stored in various locations to ensure the ability to access your images with their metadata and editing intact.

It is easy to tell if your vaults contain the up-to-date Aperture library. Red means the vault has not been updated since images have been added, deleted, or moved to another project. Yellow means the images have been stored in the vault, but a change may have been made, such as keywords added or ratings added. Black means the vault is updated.

Updating the vault is as simple as pushing a button and because it is incremental, it takes very little time or additional disk space.

After a long wait, apertureprofessional.com is announcing the release of Apple’s Aperture 2.0. Finally, a chance to see 6 months worth of Canon Powershot G9 raw images!