Controlling the organization of Aperture photos on iDevices

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Level 2

281 points

Controlling the organization of Aperture photos on iDevices

I'm trying to move from iPhoto to Aperture due to iPhoto's painfully slow RAW handling. One hurdle I'm still struggling to overcome is replicating iPhoto's simple and clean syncing with my iPhone and iPad. My first problem was that Aperture was putting both the original and modified versions of my photos onto my iPad, even though the modified was always set as the pick and my stacks were closed. I solved this issue by setting iTunes to sync all projects instead of all photos.

My new issue is the organization of those projects and my photos as they appear on the iPad and iPhone. With iPhoto, it's very simple: Events are arranged by date with the newest on top, and photos within those events are organized just as I had them in iPhoto, with my top rated photos on top. With Aperture, there seems to be no rhyme or reason to the organization of my "projects" (same as events in iPhoto), and photos within those projects are arranged by time no matter how I organize them in Aperture. And if I go to the photos tab on my iPad to view them outside of projects, there seems to be absolutely no rhyme or reason to their organization (my best guess is they're coming in arranged by filename). There's no control over the display of photos on the iDevices, so what can I do to get my photos to display as they did when I was using iPhoto? Thanks.

15" Unibody MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.4), Aperture 3.03 Trial

Posted on Sep 7, 2010 9:47 AM

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Answer 1

Cory Bauer Author

Level 2

281 points

Sep 10, 2010 5:25 PM in response to Cory Bauer

Hello? Anybody?

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Answer 2

Cory Bauer Author

Level 2

281 points

Sep 17, 2010 9:49 AM in response to Cory Bauer

Guess I have to answer my own question. I figured out last night that the order that Events or "Projects" appear on the iPad is determined by the order in which the previews were generated by Aperture. So, the last project to have previews generated will be the first Event on the iPad, and so on. Mine were all out of order because as I migrated from iPhoto to Aperture, I didn't bring my projects in all at once and I didn't bring them in oldest-to-newest.

Last night I was able to get my projects to appear chronologically in the Events tab of the iPad by manually regenerating previews in Aperture, one project at at time, starting with the oldest project first. The flaw in this system is that if I were to go back and modify an older project, causing new previews to be generated, that project would jump to the top of the Events on the iPad the next time i synced with iTunes. This is a problem.

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Answer 3

Sep 17, 2010 7:37 PM in response to Cory Bauer

If you arrange pictures manually in a project/album, they will show up on your iDevice in chronological order.

You can just click on one thumbnail, move it, then move it back, and the pictures will sync in the same order as you see in Aperture.

Definitely not ideal, but a way around the irritatingly random order of pictures you end up with otherwise.

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Answer 4

Cory Bauer Author

Level 2

281 points

Sep 19, 2010 2:20 PM in response to mbritten25

Thank you mbritten25 , that's a handy tip. Unfortunately my biggest issue is not the order of the photos within the albums or events, but rather the order of the albums and events themselves. I had gotten them to arrange chronologically with the newest event first by forcing Aperture to redraw the previews one project at a time starting with the oldest. Now they are all in chronological order, except suddenly the newest Event/Project is last. Every other event is chronological, except for the newest. How messed up is that?

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