Aperture 3.5 wish list (tongue-in-cheek)

Oh heck -- I'll pay good money for the following upgrade (off the top of my pate):

1. Rename the execrably named "Project" container.
2. Quash with the force of a billion megatons the "I know better than you what aspect ratio you want" bug.
3. Repair the relationship between Project View and the Library Inspector. Double-click a Project (or Projects) in Projects View selects them in the Library Inspector. Enable drag-and-drop between Projects View and the Library Inspector.
4. Add metadata to the Project object, in addition to the Project Description field.
5. Add a List View to the Projects View.
6. Add Tooltip for Project Names in Projects View.
7. Add Filtering the Projects View.
8. Add "Smart Views" to Projects View (analogous to Smart Albums for Images).
9. Add Badge for favorited Projects.
10. Add "Group by Year/Month" to Projects View grouping options.
11. Allow Project groups in Projects View to be collapsed (with a disclosure triangle).
12. Completely redo keywording, with fully-functioning hierarchical keywording. Must be grounded on ease of use. For starters, dynamic integration between the Keyword HUD and the Filter HUD.
13. Allow multiple color labeling. Allow any number of user-settable colored labels. Keep these _per Library_.
14. Complete access to the database.
15. Enable batch change to every field in the database, including search and replace.
16. Create two kinds of stacking: Adjustment Stacks (based on same Original) and User Stacks (manually set). Integrate these two kinds of stacking.
17. Automatically quarantine corrupt Images.
18. Allow multiple program windows to be open at the same time.
19. Add robust multi-user capabilities.
20. Re-usable, liftable, stampable brush masks. Add small thumbnail showing the brush mask for each brushed adjustment.
21. Make all Quick Brush short-cuts toggles (e.g.: "c" brings up crop, "c" closes crop, and so for the others).
22. Make Control Bar keyword buttons toggles. Pushed in = assigned; not pushed in = unassigned.
23. Allow user to fully customize the Viewer and Browser Toolbars.

It's a start. 😉 .

I'd bet against 19 as well 😀 .

DxO's Viewpoint is very useful and very well designed -- that didn't make my "off the top of my head" list, but I'd like to add it. Lens distortion correction is simply a must-have in any sophisticated workflow tool such as Aperture.

I'd love to have every one of each Image's Brush masks made available for each Adjustment, probably as a small, show-able/hide-able grid of thumbnails with checkmarks. In each Brick, click the disclosure triangle to show/hide the Image's current masks, and check the ones you want applied using that Brick. When a mask is changed, ask "Change for all Bricks currently using this mask, or for the following (check-able) Bricks, or create new mask?"

Conceptually, selection of pixels (the mask) should be separable from the actions applied to the selection (the adjustments) ... but not so much as to prevent real-time feedback.

A multiple-adjustment Brush (your "Magic Brush" would be useful).

I would like to be able to select a pixel and have Aperture show me the original values, the adjusted values, and exactly how the adjusted values were determined: a "Magic Eyedropper".

Kirby Krieger wrote:

DxO's Viewpoint is very useful and very well designed -- that didn't make my "off the top of my head" list, but I'd like to add it. Lens distortion correction is simply a must-have in any sophisticated workflow tool such as Aperture.

What I was trying to say -- 😊 -- is that the functionality and some of the design of both Viewpoint and Optics Pro should be added to Aperture. Optics Pro-like lens correction is necessary, imho. Viewpoint-like POV distortion correction would be an excellent addition.

All af them, Corky and Kirby! But most of all these:

Completely redo keywording, with fully-functioning hierarchical keywording.

With fully funtioning export and reimport and sharing of hierarchical keywords - as it is now, I have to repair the keywords and all smart albums each time I copy an image between libraries. Make it possible to manage predefined keyword views: I'd like to have one consistent set of keywords for all my libraries, but different views of subsets - one for private libraries, one for business libraries (research, teaching).

15: Enable batch change to every field in the database, including search and replace.

Yes! Batch change - and apply to originals - for all EXIF fields!

18. Allow multiple program windows to be open at the same time.

Yes, and please for different libraries!

And I'd like to add these:

1. Timezones: Fix the "Adjust Timezone" bug and show the timezones at least when adjusting date and time - how are you supposed to know to what time you are changeing a time, when you do not know the timezone? Make it possible to show timezones without having to change the date&time format system settings.
2. All metadata overlay settings in one place.
3. Adjustable sizes for GUI controls (font size, icon size, color) - as it is , I cannot read the names of the library items in the sidebar or tell the difference between the icons of the projects and albums.
4. Perspective correction (or arbitrary affine transformation) in addition to lens correction.
5. Custom image filters based on filter masks or frequency domain(Fourier transform).
6. Built in duplicate detection!
7. Removal of raw or jpeg from raw+jpeg pairs.

And I forgot:

8. A better integration of Places and metadata tags, including reverse geocoding. In AP 3.4.5 I have to name places twice: On the "Places" map and then set the metadata tags (location, country, city) in the Inspector or batch change them. And with Aperture's Places interface it is diifficult to assign a place based on the known geographic coordinates. I had to fall back on exiftool or other third-party apps to assign places to my Antarctica pictures or for my trans atlantic sailing pictures. It would help, if Aperture would show the coordinates while dragging pins. And the glitches in the timezone support are interfering with Places and tracks as well. When importing tracks from IOS devices it is not clear, how the times on the tracks are interpreted and how the time tags on the image files will be interpreted.

9. The ability to reconnect managed originals, if the connection gets lost.

➕1! (I should look up my list of feature requests -- I have at least 30 more.)

leonieDF wrote:

2. All metadata overlay settings in one place.

Yes! The Metadata Overlays dialog was a good, quick effort. Time to make it elegant.

4. Perspective correction (or arbitrary affine transformation) in addition to lens correction.

If you haven't, download the free trial of DxO Viewpoint. I think you'll like it. (Unfortunately, the cost to own is $50 and there is no Aperture plug-in. I run it as a filter in PSCC, and have become dependant on it though I haven't purchased it yet.) Imho, the controls are excellent (needs some minor UI improvements).

5. Custom image filters based on filter masks or frequency domain(Fourier transform).

ZOMG Yes! -- I think. How would these work? Anything that would let me program my own adjustment Bricks would be the kind of gift one used to expect from Apple. And I nominate "Transformer" to replace the inappropriately passive "Filter" (the mask filters; the math transforms). (← Your English is, as always, top notch. My point applies globally to the use of "filter" to represent any active alteration of data.) What I would really really really really really like are two tools: one that lets me program pixel selection based on HSV (or equivalent) and position within the Image; and one that lets me program pixel transformation (a/k/a "adjustment"). +10!

And all your others as well. Time and Place should have been fixed and integrated already. That seems like just the kind of easy-to-conceive-but-difficult-to-achieve task that Apple used to do regularly and which made programs such as Aperture a joy.

Message was edited by: Kirby Krieger - clarity.

Better still -- this should _never_ happen. Write the code so it never happens, and bury the fix in one of the trouble-shooting corrections.

➕1, Kirby. All excellent points.

Anything that would let me program my own adjustment Bricks would be the kind of gift one used to expect from Apple. And I nominate "Transformer" to replace the inappropriately passive "Filter" (the mask filters; the math transforms)

Re "Filter": This is a technical term in the image processing and image restauration/enhancement textbooks; for me filters are very active and I am reluctant to replace the term by something else. The term has its origin in the mathematical communication theory: an image is treated mathematically as a transmitted signal, and all image processing is done by applying filters to this transmitted signal - imagine doing your image adjustments by fine tuning an equalizer, just like audio filters. Emphasizing high frequencies will sharpen edges, reduzing high frequencies will reduce noise or blur an image. Usually any math dealing with image processing will be mapped to equations describing images as signals and operations on the images as filters in the frequency domain. Since ultimately all image processing will be mapped to a seqence of filters (as invented by Shannon), it is quite common in the image processing community to call any algorithm, that maps images to other images a "filter".

How to add your own adjustment bricks:

I was thinking of user defined "Filters" 😝 like in Graphic Converter: For example to be able to enter a matrix of weight factors for local pixel operations. For each pixel will the RGB-values of the pixel and its neigbors be multiplied by the weights and added up and normalized by a scale factor.

A custom "Sharpening" filter in Graphic Converter can look like this ( a variant of unsharp masking)

The RGB values of the center pixel will be multiplied by 16, and from these values the RGB values of the neighbors are subtracted, multiplied by -1 or -2, depending on their positions.

My remark "Fourier Transform" was rather tongue-in-cheek: 👿 I have indeed been thinking of filtering in the classical sense and wishing for an "equalizer" to be able to do image restauration by suppressing or emphasizing repetative patterns - bandpass filter to emphasize textures and other repetative patterns, like stripes, fences; bandblock filter to remove systematic corruptions, highpass filter to increase sharpness, lowpass filter for noise reduction or smoothing, etc.

Thanks for this. Happily more sophisticated 😀 .

leonieDF wrote:

Re "Filter": This is a technical term in the image processing and image restauration/enhancement textbooks; for me filters are very active and I am reluctant to replace the term by something else. The term has its origin in the mathematical communication theory: { ... much good stuff snipped ... } it is quite common in the image processing community to call any algorithm, that maps images to other images a "filter".