Aperture's "everything 24 hours from start" autosplit choice

Aperture import has the option "Automatically split projects" on import.

In Preferences->Import you have various options, including "One project per day".

If you set to one project per day, it will label the projects e.g. May 18, 2013; May 19, 2013 and so on.

Except it doesn't work.

Because what they have actually done is define "per day" as "24 hours from the first photo for a day".

So if your first photo is at 10am on May 18, the project May 18, 2013 will include all photos up to 10am on May 19.

This is not the usual definition of a day.

Apple should either change "one project per day" to mean every photo from a specific date (as read from camera metadata)

or at most, have two options: "one project per day" and "one project per 24 hour window". (Although I can't imagine anyone finding 24 hour window to be a useful way to group photos.)

Currently the description is misleading and the behaviour is not as expected.

I have reported this in Aperture feedback with every single version they have released, but they have never changed it, although the sorting by date of projects has at least improved over time. It is still very odd (it doesn't maintain the order by date after import or creation of a new dated project; you have to endlessly close Aperture, reopen and re-sort by date.) It seems they expect you to group projects by name, not by date. Date-based grouping is very poorly supported and clearly secondary for them.