The Great Migration

Apple announced Aperture 3 just over two weeks ago. Unfortunately, even though a trial version is offered for download, I had to wait for it to be delivered snail-mail because I needed a licensed copy to upgrade my existing library. Why I still need a physical disk to install software in 2010 is beyond me.

As I wrote previously, I had intended to keep my iPhoto and Aperture libraries separate, leaving all of my pre-SLR photos in the former. I hit a snag with that strategy. One of the nice advantages of Apple product hegemony is that everything plays very nicely together. I can sync my entire photo library to my iPhone and to my Apple TV. In fact, the photo screen saver on Apple TV is its most understated feature. Whenever we have people over I turn on some music and random pictures float across the screen.

Unfortunately you have to choose either iPhoto or Aperture when you sync, so I had to move everything into one library, and that took a lot of work.

Aperture does offer a one step full import of your iPhoto library which carries over all of you metadata including Faces and Places, so that part was easy. Once I got it there, I went through each Event (in Aperture Events translate into Projects) to clean it up.

Did I have to clean up all of these legacy projects? Of course not, but I had my Aperture library in pristine shape, and I wanted to keep it that way.

First of all I wanted to clean up the keywords. I used to tag all of my photos with the names of who was in them, but that seems redundant with facial recognition, so I removed those. I added other keywords for activity, location, holidays, and other categories. I also tag photos that were taken by other photographers to make sure I give them credit ("By Kirsten", "By Leslie", etc). Before I had an SLR I relied heavily on others with better equipment and a better understanding of photography for good shots.

I also re-rated most of the pictures. I now have a stricter scale and am stingier with five star ratings. As of this writing I have only rated seven of my own shots rated this highly. Also, my standard ho-hum rating used to be three stars, now it's two.

Finally I cropped most of them. Now that I understand a little about photography I know how important it is for a picture to have a clear subject without much else. Ideally I try to take tight shots in the camera, but cropping can accomplish the same thing. It's better to have a low resolution clean shot than a high resolution cluttered one.

There are over 3,000 pictures in my library (not including all of the ones I've thrown away). After more hours than I care to admit, I've finally got a tightly organized library. Becky thinks I'm crazy but I can't help myself, I'm a perfectionist.

My Workflow

My workflow for processing pictures and eventually publishing them to the web via Flickr involves several steps, and I'm trying to think of ways to improve it.

First, I import my pictures from my camera to a folder through Image Capture, a utility that comes standard on the Mac. If I spent time playing around with my camera and have some obvious junk images, I'll delete them from this folder.

Second, I import these files from that folder into Aperture, Apple's raw editor and photo organizer. Here I reject bad, uninteresting, and duplicate photos, process the good ones (cropping, color correction, exposure adjustments, etc), and enter image names.

Third, I export the images from Aperture into another folder and then import them into iPhoto. Here I rate the images, add keywords to them (type of image and who is in it), identify faces (iPhoto '09 added a facial recognition feature, but it usually fails to identify the person so I have to do this manually).

In the fourth and final step I export the iPhoto event to Flickr.

This process seems like too much work because I'm maintaining separate photo libraries in both Aperture and iPhoto. Aperture can import pictures directly from iPhoto, but the reverse isn't possible.

To make my life easier, I need to remove either iPhoto or Aperture from my workflow. Aperture is the only real choice for me of course because it has more features for a serious amateur photographer such as myself.

However iPhoto has several useful features that Aperture lacks. The ability to organize photos by faces is really cool, though like I mentioned earlier it isn't perfect and I'm already keywording my pictures with who is in them. Also iPhoto has a built-in export to Flickr; I can do this in Aperture as well but I have to purchase a third-party plugin.

Aperture is overdue for a refresh, and I'm sure Apple is getting close to releasing version 3.0 even though Apple is really good at keeping new software releases secret, so it stands to reason that some of iPhoto's features will be included in the next release. Flickr export is a no-brainer, though I'm not sure about facial recognition which might be seen as more of a consumer oriented feature.

Moving off of iPhoto entirely is a scary thought to me, primarily because of the untold hours I've put into organizing my photo library with it, which today stands at 3,566 pictures. Instead of going down the path of importing everything into Aperture, I think I'll keep my older pictures in iPhoto and manage newer pictures with Aperture. The natural cutoff between the two would be anything shot since I got my first SLR in April 2009.

Hopefully by spending less time doing tedious work on the computer I'll end up spending more time taking pictures.