Aperture

I've been looking into geotagging my photos and finally got around to purchasing a GPS logger. Initially, I just wanted a script to automate the merging of the latitude and longitude from the GPS log into each image's EXIF information, after which, I'd just import the images into Aperture as normal. But then I found out that even more useful would be to reverse geocode the images. This would mean the the IPTC fields for city, state and country would be automatically populated, saving me from the task of manually entering each in Aperture.

Well, HoudahGeo does it better and more elegantly than any other software out there. After downloading a demo and reading Brett Gross' write-up on Aperture and houdahGeo I was sold.

The one glitch is that HoudahGeo saves both the city and the state into the IPTC city field, separated by a comma and a space, e.g., Great River, New York. I sent an email to the developers and was told that the next version, 1.5, would have this fix. Until then, I've whipped up an Automator workflow with a bit of bash scripting that calls exiftool that splits the IPTC metadata properly and will work with cities and states with any characters, including spaces, but not commas. Here's the guts to the Split IPTC City And State Automator Script:

# This automator workflow is licensed under the GPL, v2
for f in "$@"
do
        CITYSTATE=`exiftool -City -s -s -s $f`
        CITY=${CITYSTATE%,*}
        STATE=${CITYSTATE#*, }
        exiftool -overwrite_original -City="$CITY" -Province-State="$STATE" $f
done

So my workflow is now:

1. Copy photos from memory card to temporary directory on my harddrive along with GPS log
2. Use HoudahGeo to tag each image with longitude, latitude and altitude, along with the city/state and country
3. Save the GPS log away in case I need it later
4. Run the Automator script on the images to fix the city/state issue (installing it as a Finder plugin is recommended)
5. Import the images into Aperture

GPS2Aperture Lite is a free and simple geotagging application for use with Apple's Aperture and Google Earth. You can view GPS positions of images in Google Earth, and embed GPS positions in the Master file for a Version.

GPS2Aperture does make changes to your Master files to embed the GPS data, but it does so using EXIFTool, the same command line application that is the basis of HoudahGeo and several other popular geotagging programs.

You can output Aperture book pages as JPEG or TIFF images. These images are output as 200 DPI by default. Although Aperture does not offer a direct way to control the DPI setting when you do this, there is a way you can change it.

I noticed Power Stroke, Light! and Ozone all in Apple's Aperture Downloads section. You can find a bit more information at Digital Film Tools' page for Aperture plugins. Overall, nothing I'm interested in, but I can see as more plugins are released for Aperture (maybe a collection of plugins for $100 or so), Photoshop will be used less and less.

So, finally, I've drawn together my thoughts about keywording in Aperture. My problem with keywording has always been more about "how can I make it easy enough that I will actually do it?", rather than "what should the keywords be?". I'll explain my personal taste for both, though.

...

In Aperture, you have not only a hierarchical keyword structure, but also a list of arbitrary key-value pairs for every single image you shoot. This is insane power currently, I believe, hampered by what is a fairly weak interface to that power.

Anyway, again, I was looking for a way to lower the barrier to actually doing the keywording and I found it. The feature has existed in Aperture since 1.0 but the way it’s presented in the documentation really led me away from considering using it on a regular basis.

In recent months, a lot of new image editors have appeared on the Mac platform. New APIs from Apple such as Core Image have allowed small, indie developers to create quite sophisticated image editing tools.

I've seen a few reviews of these applications, but the reviews mostly concentrate on user interface concerns. I'd like to do something different here; Instead of simply looking at their UI, I'd like to look at how these applications handle tasks I typically do. In this review, I'll look at three different tasks:

1. Stitching a few shots to create a panorama image
2. Adding a fancy title to a picture
3. Creating a simple pixel image

I will not look at fixing levels, exposure and the like, since iPhoto does a pretty good job at that, and I think most people will use these editors in conjunction with iPhoto or even Aperture or Lightroom, using them to do tasks that involve layers and selections and pixel-level operations, features which iPhoto, Aperture and Lightroom don't provide.

As you've probably noticed by now, Apple's Aperture 2 trial does not convert your Aperture 1.5 library. They do this because it is a one way conversion and if you opt not to buy the upgrade, you cannot switch back or otherwise use your current Aperture 1.5 to open the library. But what good is a demo without photos to use with it? Well, you could just import a handful oh photos you've got, but one of the biggest reasons to upgrade is Aperture 2 is supposed to be worlds faster. The only way to really see this is to load your entire library in Aperture 2 and give it a whirl.

First, close Aperture 1.5, rename it so something like Old Aperture, download the Aperture 2 demo, and install it. Navigate in Finder to your library and view the package contents (don't double click it, that will just try to open it in Aperture). See all those projects in there? Move them out of there, someplace else, temporarily. Now open Aperture 2; it will probably tell you it can't convert your library and ask if you want to create a trial library. Agree and name your new library. Next, go to File, Import then Projects. Select all those projects in that temporary holding place. This will take a while. No, really.

The bad news is, this won't work if you've got a 100 GB library and only 50 GB of free space. You can always buy Aperture 2 and then it will convert it for you, and rather quickly at that. The good news is, you can move those projects back into the old Aperture 1.5 library package and there's all your stuff, just as it was before this entire Aperture 2 brouhaha.

Don't forget that this doesn't change you from RAW decoder 1.1 to RAW decoder 2.0. There's a pretty nifty way to migrate your images selectively to RAW 2.0 to handle that. You get the (supposedly) better image quality and lens metadata as well.

I've migrated my entire library to Aperture 2, but I'm going to be a bit more careful about migrating to the new RAW 2.0 decoder, particularly with my best images. Here's my plan of action:

I decided that I was happy to migrate en masse images with no adjustments. Fortunately, Aperture makes this easy. I selected one of my folders and chose Migrate Folder from the File menu. This gives you two sets of options. The first option is whether to directly migrate versions, or to create new versions using the RAW 2.0 decoder. The second option is whether to migrate all images, only images with adjustments or only images without adjustments. I chose to directly migrate only those images with no adjustments.

Aperture 2 can extract metadata about the lens model you used from your image’s EXIF, if your camera writes it. A few little points I discovered about this:

Firstly, the field is not shown by default in the Metadata panel. You have to go to the Metadata tab, disclose the EXIF panel at the bottom and then select the checkbox beside the Lens Model field.

Sweet. I loves me some metadata. Now to make it play nice with my website. You see, mere focal length isn't enough.

Enter OS X 10.5.2 and, according to Apple, the problem is solved. Time Machine will now happily back up your Aperture database (both Aperture 1.5 and 2) without a problem. That sound you hear is thousands of Aperture users breathing a sigh of relief.