Away to Me

Hoping to solve the couple of on-going nagging problems with Aperture 2.01, I decided to see if upgrading to Leopard would resolve the issues.   It was a relatively painless process.

I had to partition one of the external hard drives for Super Duper to have a space to make a bootable copy of my system before I upgraded to Leopard (just in case I needed to go back to Tiger).  Partitioning the drive was easy in Disk Utility, but meant the contents of that drive were erased.

I chose to do an Archive and Install type of installation.  That leaves a folder called “Previous System” installed on your computer.  Once you are sure everything is working okay, you will probably want to delete that folder because it takes up about 10GB of hard disk space.

Doing the Super Duper copy and installing Leopard took a few hours, especially since there were several software updates to install immediately.

Now the good and the bad news . . . the good news is that I have not had any problems with Leopard since I installed it and the fun features like the new stationery in Mail give additional opportunities to have fun with your images stored in Aperture or iPhoto.

The bad news is that the cropping and exporting problems are still persisting.  Luckily, exporting as a TIFF is working fine.

In the ongoing saga of trying to sort through problems with Aperture 2.01, I’ve encountered a new and scarier problem. A couple of images that I’ve tried to work on that experienced the cropping issue, have disappeared from my Aperture library after I quit and re-opened it. While trying to crop and then remove the adjustments (since the crop ratio wasn’t working correctly), an “X” has appeared in the lower left hand corner of the image that I am unable to remove and the image disappears.

The vaults are still showing either yellow or black meaning that no images have been added or removed. Luckily, I had never deleted the images out of a folder that stored them before I imported them into Aperture, so I was able to re-import them.

Before trying anything else in Aperture, I have now decided that a good course of action is to export all of my masters onto a hard drive so that I have copies of them outside of Aperture in addition to inside Aperture. With about a 90 GB main Aperture library, this is taking a little while and is definitely going to fill up the 500 GB drives quickly since they house either the library or vaults plus now a folder with all of the master images. If I had done extensive editing, I’d also want to export the versions, but I am satisfied to at least have copies of all my master images stored outside of Aperture.

One of the nice features in Aperture is how it lets you control so much when you export images. I’ve opted to have them exported into subfolders by year, month, day and have them retain the master file names that I gave them. It is an organized structure and makes it easy for me to find any image that I need.

With hard drives at the low prices they are at, redundancy pays off, paranoia pays off, and keeping your images stored in different ways pays off.

During the day yesterday, the artifact issues and Aperture crashing seemed to clear up, but other problems appeared. Cropping was not working properly and trying to export a full-size JPEG (from a RAW image) resulted in a thumbnail being exported instead of the full-size JPEG. After posting about my problems on the Apple Aperture support forum, I received an email with some suggestions as possible fixes. They were:

Upgraded to 2.01 this morning and now I am having some serious problems. I am pretty much unable to make any adjustment without everything freezing. I am unable to even do a force quit and am having to resort to re-booting with the power button. Haven’t had time to see where the problem is coming from or if I’m alone in this, but just a word of warning if you haven’t already upgraded.

Not only is everything working EXTREMELY slow or freezing, the adjustments are causing strange artifacts. Here is before:

Here is with shadow adjusted to about 20:

Here’s what my browser looks like after moving “Highlight” up to 7:

and my desktop and secondary monitor had the same artifacts even after I quit out of Aperture until I re-started my computer again.

Here is a look at my “workspace”.

On the left is a 23″Apple Cinema Display that is connected to a MacBook Pro. On the MacBook Pro, Aperture is set to “Browser Only” view. The second monitor is set to “Alternate” to display a single selected image.

Currently, I have two 500 GB external hard drives on my desk. One stays connected almost all of the time and holds my Aperture libraries. The second one holds one set of “Vaults”. Immediately after importing images into Aperture, I connect the second drive and update the vault. As soon as it is done updating, I unplug it from the computer and from electrical power. We have a lot of electrical storms and power surges here and I am risk averse, even with surge protectors.

A third external hard drive stays in a fireproof safe in a secure location. It contains a second set of “Vaults”. When I need to update the vaults in drive #3, I take the first hard drive containing vaults and place it in the safe.

This set-up has worked well for me as an amateur photographer due to its simplicity and relatively low cost. I have the confidence that there are at least three copies of my Aperture Libraries on three separate drives, besides the projects burned onto DVDs. If one drive fails, I have not lost what matters to me the most - the only souvenir I bring back from a trip - photographs.

Creating new libraries in Aperture is quite simple.

1. Under Aperture, click Preferences.

2. Under General, click Choose. The Library Location that is showing is the last Aperture library that you opened.

3. Select a location to store your new library. In this case, it is in a folder I made called “Aperture Libraries” on an external hard drive. On your internal hard drive, “Pictures” is the likely default location.

Do not highlight any existing library, but just press “Select” and quit out of Aperture.

4. Open the folder that you selected in step 3.

You can see a new library called “Aperture Library” has been created. Re-name it now to avoid duplication. Your new library is created and ready to open with a simple double-click.

To switch between libraries with Aperture open, follow the steps above and at Step 3, highlight the next library you wish to open. Press “Select”. Quit Aperture and re-open it and the library you chose will open.

When Aperture is not open, a simple double click on the library that you wish to use will open it.

One of the wonderfully flexible features in Aperture is the ability to name your files just about any way you want to. The default is the file name from the camera.   My preference is a name that includes the date and time the photograph was taken.  Since I store the images taken by 3 family members within one Master Aperture Library, I chose a custom naming preset that included their initials along with the date and time the image was taken.  If I ever choose to move my images out of Aperture, it will be easy to keep them organized by photographer and date.  (note - Aperture allows you to re-name images on import or export, so if you haven’t named your images on import, don’t despair).

Here’s how to set up a custom naming preset:

1.  When you choose to import images, an information box appears that allows you to add metadata at import. 

Under “Version Name”, choose “Edit”.

2.  A naming preset box will appear. Click the plus button under “Name”, Aperture allows you to set up a new naming preset. In the format box, drag the buttons from below in the order that you want the name to appear.

I opted to start the image name with our initials, so the first button I chose was “Custom Name”. After moving the custom name button into the format box, type the name you want in the “Custom Name” box. You might choose to name your images “Europe” or “Wedding” or some other identifying element.

After identifying the photographer, the next thing I wanted was the time the image was taken. I chose the year, month, day format, followed by the time. An underscore between the day and time makes it clearer. Click “OK” and you’ve developed a new naming preset.

Since your master image name can only be changed on import or export, think it through before you move your whole iPhoto library into Aperture.

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.