I’ve been a long-time SmugMug user, and have always appreciated the quality of their service. The fact that I can sell prints to clients without having to do anything other than watch my bank account grow, and that when you send a question to their tech support, real people respond — and quickly — makes it a fantastic service. It’s not free, but as they say—you get what you pay for.

There are a couple of plug-ins for Aperture that allow you to upload to SmugMug directly, and I’ve always used ApertureToSmugMug, which was OK… bare-bones, but it worked. My frustration with SmugMug and the plug-in (and this hasn’t changed, as you’ll see in a moment) is that I have to make changes in several places to complete my gallery upload, before it’s ready to share with a client, my blog, or whatever.

SmuginProForAperture

Recently the author of SmuginProForAperture, Richard Laing, contacted me and asked if I’d have a look at his new plug-in. Regrettably I kept shoving the email to the bottom of my inbox, in one those “I know, I know… I will” continuous moments. Today though I needed to upload some images to SmugMug for a client and decided that was a great time to try out Richard’s new plug-in!

In fact, I liked it so much that it quickly earned the coveted Command-S keyboard shortcut in Aperture. Since there is no Save in Aperture, this is the closest thing to “saving” a photo I could think of! And it really is “saving” it, isn’t it… saving it to the cloud.

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I’ve been extolling the virtues of setting preferences for smaller preview images in Aperture 3, and also recommending turning OFF automatic preview generation for many users, for some time now. However Derrick Story, of TheDigitalStory.com has just posted an article related to making slideshows that give a very good reason to use larger previews.

If you use Aperture 3’s slideshow feature, you owe it to yourself to read this article, “Higher Quality Video Output from Aperture 3”

I’m thrilled to see the new User Tips section starting to gain some traction. Remember, I opened this part of the site so YOU guys can post your own favorite tips on there to share with the world. A pile of ‘em just got posted, so be sure to check those out!

What’s that you say; “how am I supposed to know every time something new is posted to this site”? So glad you asked ;-) At the top of any page (this Tips & Tricks page, the User Tips page, the Forums, or even a specific post you want to track), you can subscribe to any updates made, and be notified by email.

Once you’re logged into the site (registration required, of course) click on your name at the very top of the window and from the drop down menu, choose Subscribe to Page Updates. 

If you ever want to cancel getting those emails, just return to the page and that line will read Remove Update Subscription.

I’d be interested to hear your opinions/experiences on this one. Martyn Greswolde of Greswolde Photography in the UK posted advice to his readers that if you run a backup (on referenced masters) while Aperture is running, not only will it not back up those masters, but it could actually corrupt your backup file. The backup solution he’s using is Chrono Sync.

Read his post, and if you have any experience with using third-party local backup solutions, please share your experience in the comments here.

Usually when I import the photos off a card, I’ll recycle the card right away. That’s assuming that I’ve imported and backed up immediately, or imported to the Drobo at a minimum. But sometimes if I’m on the road and I’m just not shooting that much, I may want to import pictures long before the card is full—and would like to leave the existing photos on the card as an extra backup, at least until I’m back home.

Aperture has a nice “Do not import duplicates” feature in the Import dialog, but as you may have noticed, if you rename Masters on import, then this feature no longer works. It relies on matching file names to detect duplicates—so once you’ve renamed your Masters, there’s no name to match.

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