The Cattery

The Cattery

Widening the Aperture

27 April 2006
Filed under Mac, Photography, Text, The Interweb

I was probably the first idiot in Australia to fork out the $799 Apple was asking for Aperture. I placed my order within 15 minutes of it being announced (despite some reservations about my once-glorious dual 2ghz G5’s ability to run it), and it arrived in the mail at almost the same moment that somebody IM’ed me Ars Technica’s damning review of it. Gulp.

So I installed it and fired it up with my heart in my mouth. Apart from its horrible slowness, which I accept is mostly the fault of my video card (it doesn’t meet Apple’s demanding ‘recommended hardware’ guidelines), I was guardedly impressed. There are some horrible flaws (a few of which have been corrected in 1.1), but the interface is nice, the photo editing features suit my requirements right down to the ground, and there’s nothing I love more than organising stuff. In the few days after I installed it, all the projects, albums, smart albums and folders gave me pretty much nothing but joy. I tweaked workspaces, imported my iPhoto library, keyworded, lightboxed, stacked, louped, sharpened, brightened and adjusted contrast for HOURS.

And then I realised: Flickr Export for Aperture doesn’t exist.

What a blow. Three or four months earlier, I’d discovered Flickr Export and it had made such positive difference to the process of uploading my pics that I’d started doing it quite a lot. I’d purchased a Pro account, sucked up to some contacts, made a few comments and got a few back. Fun! But Aperture wrecked it for me. Without Flickr Export, exporting photos, and then uploading and organizing them, was a tiresome, several-step process, and I just kind of stopped doing it. Almost weekly I’d Google ‘Aperture Flickr export’ hoping for some brilliant fix, and get the same answer: nada.

In desperation, I turned this week to the Aperture discussion forums on the Apple website. It’s an active community, but most threads degenerate into “Aperture’s crap!” / “is not!”, which is basically unhelpful. Still, a search turned up an Automator workflow that works in conjunction with Fraser Speirs’ Flickr Upload action to achieve more or less what I wanted it to: an almost-invisible way of getting my pics from Aperture into Flickr, complete with all the relevant metadata.

My one real complaint about the workflow was that the setup required me to create a separate project for photos I wanted to send to Flickr, which either means moving master files from another project (thus breaking my neat system of having a project for each major set of photos, ie. USA 2006) or copying files from other projects, which is messy and wrecks Aperture’s neat master-file-and-versions system.

So I sat down and hammered out a new and only marginally less kludgy version of the workflow, which you can read about and download here.

Views from the Floor

Steve says:

You're probably not going to want to learn that the engineers responsible for Aperture were either fired or transfered. At least that is what ThinkSecret is saying (and it's record has been less than impressive of late)...

Virginia says:

Oh I know - this is just unbelievable. I guess I've got my fingers crossed that they're just sacking the people who fucked it up in the first place, and will replace them with a good crew.

Wilson Miner says:

I'd lay money that's the case. It's happened before, with DVD Studio Pro which was kind of a dud at 1.0. I'd bet that Aperture 2.0 will be a major rewrite by a new team, and it will be great.

Steve says:

Confirmation that Aperture will continue:

http://blakeseely.com/blog/archives/2006/04/27/change/

Jacob says:

Hi Virginia, Aperture support was added to the uploader that I develop (supporting Flickr plus other services) back in January. Do send feedback if you have any suggestions or queries. (Note that the v1.6 beta fixes a bug with Aperture import so give that a try in preference to v1.5.)

Speak, friend, and enter


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