Aperture 4

I'd like to add some features I wish to have in Aperture 4.

Faces

Places

I'd like to have the ability to correct country, state and city names, which are wrong in some cases.

As in Faces, I'd like to have the possibility to add country, state, city and place names as keywords to the images.

I would love to be able to group faces, for instance as "family". Maybe the contact groups within the agenda could be used.

Keywords

It'll be nice to assign hierachical keywords to the photos automatically. For example: I have a keyword "cathedral", which is under "church" and get both keywords assigned. I'd like to decide whether or not to add a tag as a keyword. For instance "church" itself belongs to "building", and I don't want to assign "building" as a keyword.

Additionally, I would like to create cross-relations between keywords. Let's say "Dresden" belongs to "Free State of Saxony" and to "District of Dresden" (a former administration unit of East Germany), which itself belongs to "GDR".

I'd like to assign multilanguage tags. For example, I wish to tag a photo with "Warszawa", "Warschau" and "Warsaw", selecting "Varsovia" as a spanish named tag. Additionally, I'd like to create alternative names for tags, e.g. "Big Apple" for "New York" etc.

I'd like to be able to remap keywords to EXIF and IPTC tags, and enrich or overwrite the default definitions.

Image title

I would like to edit the image title in the different views, which should be mapped to the title and caption tags.

Two more

1

I would like when you send images to email (Mail) that it doesn't send them in Rich Text Format when you have set Mail to send them in Plain Text

2

I would like to be able to export my captions in a text file with just the image name and caption, ie without all the

"Version Name Title Urgency Categories Suppl. Categories Keywords Instructions Date Created Contact Creator Contact Job Title City State/Province Country Job Identifier Headline Provider Source Copyright Notice Caption Caption Writer Rating IPTC Subject Code Usage Terms Intellectual Genre IPTC Scene Location ISO Country Code Contact Address Contact City Contact State/Providence Contact Postal Code Contact Country Contact Phone Contact Email Contact Website Label Latitude Longitude Altitude AltitudeRef"

palava and without the keywords, rating number etc etc.

Even better if if the captions could be automatically added inline with the images when you are sending them to email, ie in the body of the email as well as built in to the jpg. Iview Media Pro managed that but then again look what happened to it!

Armagh Mac wrote:

I would like when you send images to email (Mail) that it doesn't send them in Rich Text Format when you have set Mail to send them in Plain Text

Even better if if the captions could be automatically added inline with the images when you are sending them to email, ie in the body of the email as well as built in to the jpg. Iview Media Pro managed that but then again look what happened to it!

Avoidance of Rich Text would be nice, but iPhoto does the same, as well.

However, you don't want the captions or filenames to be below or between attachments, either, as this may be a problem even in Plain Text for certain recipient email apps.

Ernie

So I've updated my wish list. I'm running Lion on a 2.66GHz Intel Core i7 processor with 8GB of memory and Aperture crashes about 80-90% of the time. It's got to the point that I am kind of excited when I finish and it didn't crash; like I got away with something. ****, I'm just happy when it opens on the first click. I repair my permissions weekly and my databese almost as often, hoping this will help. It's hard to see it as anything other than one of iLife programs (Apple goes to great lengths to remind us that it's really similar to iPhoto) and not a pro level piece of software. If the head of my hammer fell off three out of every four times, I would throw it out and I'm getting to that point with A3. So... Santa, if you're listening, I would like the following in the next Aperture:

1. A stable work platform where the SPINNING BEACH BALL OF DEATH isn't part of my workflow. (OK, I'll admit that A3 does force me to multitask... I keep A3 on one desktop and everything else on another, so when I want to do something crazy, like stamp the white balance onto three or four images, I can get other work done while I'm waiting for the spinning beach ball of death to stop spinning or the crash to occur.)

2. My often repeated gripe is the file namimg... Don't revert back to the master file name when an image has visited Photoshop. If I sort by filename, adjusted images are out of sequence because they have new names.

3. Make 0 or 1 the default starting point on renamimg sequential files, instead of where I left off on the last project. Sometimes I forget to go back in and reset it.

4. When I'm comparing mutiple images in fullscreen view, give me a way (control click or something) to change or designate one of the images with out having to back out and change from pick one/pick all mode.

5. Make cleaning up easier. When I'm done with a project, I don't want to hold onto all of the psd files and all of the corrections. I just want the final collection of images. Give me a clean up button that keeps only the final jpegs. I export all of the jpegs, delete the project and re-import the images back in as a new project taking up much less space. Write a script that does this for me. Please.

6. I have one library on an external and keep a working library on my laptop so I can get work done on the plane. Give me a way to synch keywords, metadata templates and filenamimg between my libraries so i don't have to re-invent the wheel everytime.

The image adjustment tools are fine, they are less of a priority to me than the things that make do stuff over and over to stay organized.

Message was edited by: lapresle

lapresle,

The instability problems you report sound dreadful! I'm running a 45K+ image Aperture on a 12GB iMac with a 3.4GHz i7, Snow Leopard, and system on an SSD, and I can't recall the last time Aperture crashed. I'm thinking it was about 6-12 months ago when I was using a 2.4 GHz MBP with 8GBs and a 7,200 rpm hard drive.

I would say I'm getting maybe one or two crashes a year.

You shouldn't be getting this sort of behavior, it is not characteristic of the beast.

I'm assuming you have taken this up with Apple?

If this were happening to me, I'd certainly do that. And I'd look to see if my Mac was paging too much (Page Outs), the HDD was too full or too fragmented. I'd also try creating a new Ap Lib and importing the old one into it to see if that cleaned up some corruption that hasn't been cleaned up via the Option-Command start procedure.

What you are looking for in wish list item 1 doesn't require an "Aperture 4" to fix!

Aperture has been a workhorse for me since version 1 and I love the workflow in provides, or rather the range of choice thereof. It has the intuitive ease of use that Apple is known for and to me the UI is just the right amount of polished withouth distracting from the task. As an organizer/editor I love it.

But recently, with version 3 on Lion it has become unstable. It often crashes when entering full screen mode. But even worse is that version 2 and 3 has on a couple of occasions actually corrupted RAW files beyond repair. They end up looking like when you play a badly scratched DVD and neither Photoshop, nor Lightroom or Graphic Converter is able to read them. In addition to that I don't think the database/file system hybrid solution to be well enough thought out to prevent accidentially removing images permanently.

Lightroom is not my cup of tea UI wise and I'm currently struggling to find a natural and effective workflow. But the way I see it I will have to live with that for now because of a couple of things I learned recently from a pro photographer who was consulting for Adobe on the latest version:

1. LR now uses native RAW format specs to process the files instead of the reverse engineered approach Aperture still uses. I don't know how this affects the IQ in practicality, but in general I think LR/ACR processed files look cleaner.
2. LR uses ProPhoto RGB all the way as the internal color space. This has a profound effect because it actually has a slightly wider gamut than most cameras. Nobody but Apple knows what Aperture's "super wide internal color space" means, but I'm unable to get more than Adobe RGB out of it. Adobe RGB is far from super wide and whichever way you convert to it, huge amounts of adjustment headroom is discarded. I cannot safely verify this, I am merely noting that have gotten less stock photo rejections based on distorted pixels since I converted to Lightroom.

I am a pixel peeper, so are the stock agencies and increasingly so are my clients. Pixel perfection matters when size is large and sadly Aperture does not stack up for me anymore.

oybrator wrote:

<snip> But even worse is that version 2 and 3 has on a couple of occasions actually corrupted RAW files beyond repair. They end up looking like when you play a badly scratched DVD and neither Photoshop, nor Lightroom or Graphic Converter is able to read them. <snip>

Are you sure that Aperture is to blame for this corruption? It seems unlikely that the masters would be corrupted by the software, since Aperture is intended to never modify masters, and it seems strange that Aperture would find a way to do this...

I believe that it's more likely that your masters have been corrupted by hardware malfunctions such as in the CPU, RAM, data channel or disk drive. These events are rare, but they do happen. Every time you copy data, there is a small but finite probability that data is corrupted. The more images you have, the greater the likelihood that a block is damaged.

Maybe you have evidence that it it is definitely Aperture's fault?

I agree with John. I don't think Aperture would be to blame for the RAW file corruption.

Just out of curiosity, how do you copy your files into your computer? I used to connect my camera to the computer with a USB cable until I discovered it would sometimes quit the import before it was completed. I'm not sure what the technical issue was, but it caused one of my RAW files to come in corrupted. I've since switched to using a CF card reader for all of my imports.

As a side note, I almost didn't catch it until it was too late. Because the thumbnail was a jpeg preview from the camera, I had no idea anything was wrong with the image until I tried to open it up in a larger view. I'd already formatted the card and everything, so I thought I was out of luck. Fortunately, I was able to use data recovery software on the card and re-import the picture. Close call!

Doug

Absolute proof is hard to come by in such cases. You decide:

I import my files through a card reader and I never touch them outside Aperture/Lightroom because I know that leads to all kinds of mess and having to reconnect files. I have never experienced that the images were corrupted immediately after import. One day I would just be browsing through images and one by one the previews would go black or look like a broken DVD the moment I clicked on them. After that I quit Aperture and tried to open the same files in Photoshop only to be told that they were of a format Photoshop could not understand. I tried to open other images in the same project directly from Finder and they would be fine. I backed them up an launched Aperture again and tried viewing the images that did work in Photoshop inside of Aperture and those too would get corrupted. Once again Photoshop didn't want anything to do with them after I'd attempted to view them in Aperture.

I'm on a MacBook Pro with the images on the internal SSD and (was then) on Slow Leopard. A friend of mine actually experienced the same. He was also on Snow Leopard, but on an iMac with a regular spinning hard drive and the photos were stored on a Synology NAS. His case happened before mine, so we naturally assumed that it was unsafe to store Apertures referenced masters on a NAS. Then I had the same problem.

Sounds like you have had the SSD eqivalent of a disk error

Armagh Mac wrote:

I would suggest they remove things like Faces and Places until they get them to work properly. I have 4gb of ram and can't use Faces. I would suggest there are a lot of computers out there with less than 4gb.

Odd. I'm using both on a MacBook with 2GB memory and they work. Places is nice for holidays, and Faces is practically essential when photographing school events.

I'm in the same boat as you - on my old MacBook with 2GB memory, everything worked normally. Faces was a little slow, but it's to be expected with a 25K+ image library on a FireWire 400 drive.

Is it true that Apple are abandoning pro's and there will be no 4. A new enhanced iPhoto is to be replaced as a replacement to both aimed, at the consumer market. just a rumour but it makes sense when you see how Apple are developing retail.

nonsense.

Absolute nonsense! Especially the part about iPhoto replacing Aperture. What is your source for this nonsense?