Fun Backup Infographic

Things have been slow in Aperture-land, so here’s a little something to tide you over…

I’ve talked about backup a bunch in the past (just go to the Archives page and do a page text search for “backup”) which apparently got some attention; this infographic was sent along to me to consider sharing. It’s cute and relavent, so here you go. Enjoy!

And… back up!!!

Thanks to OnlineBackupGeeks.com for sharing this visualization.

Backblaze Cloud Backup Now Features iOS App

This is a nice (and free!) addition to an already stellar service. If you’re a Backblaze user, you can now get a free iOS app to monitor your backups and even retrieve files on the go.

For those new to the site, I’ll say it again… unless you have three copies of a file, the file doesn’t exist. The original, a local backup, and an offsite backup are critical to your data survival!

I’ve written about Blackblaze before here. Check out these article if you haven’t already:

• Cloud Backup; Backblaze in the Real World
• Backblaze and the Backup Bouncer Test

As always you can sign up for the service here and try it out for free.

On a personal note, while I’ve never had to recover an entire drive to to crash or theft, I have recovered many accidentally deleted files. I think that’s even more embarrassing, frankly… but thank goodness they were on Backblaze!

Some B&W Love for Aperture Users

Some of you may have seen the posts I’ve been placing on theBWphoto.com, in preparation for my current big gallery show, “The Sculpture Series”. Well, the show is now hanging, and the official opening is this Friday. So exciting!

I’ve been discussing in quite a bit of detail the steps along the way, but I haven’t shared anything here. This post is a bit of a summary so if you are interested, you know where to go.

• Official “Sculpture Series” page
• A summary of links to each of the eight stories published
• The one post with the detailed steps followed
• And, not to beat a dead horse, but my 15% discount on the Google Nik Plugins (Silver Efex Pro II was the cornerstone of these B&W conversions and look amazing on 60ʺ prints!) will absolutely, positively, expire. I don’t know when, but I’ve been informed that it will. So… if you haven’t yet, click here to get the best deal possible on the suite.

And below I’ve embedded the narrated video capture of the entire edit of one of the images.

Digital Camera RAW Update 4.05 for Aperture and iPhoto — Fujifilm Users Rejoice!

Thanks @Gordito73 for catching this!

Hot on the tail of the Aperture 3.4.4 update is the Digital Camera RAW Compatibility Update 4.05, including… wait for it… Fujifilm cameras!

yaaaaaaayyyyy (I can hear it from here)

Here’s the list:

• Fujifilm X20
• Fujifilm X100S
• Fujifilm X-E1
• Fujifilm X-Pro1

I have a few RAW files from the X-E1, and loaded one up pre and post update. It took a few seconds of looking at the “unsupported image format” screen before it kicked in, but there it is!

Look ma, Fuji X-E1 support in Aperture!It’s in the App Store now. As of this writing it’s not on apple.com yet.

Aperture 3.4.4 Released

It’s no Lightroom 5 beta, but it’s an update…

Aperture 3.4.4 has been released, addressing a series of specific bugs and the ubiquitous “includes stability and performance improvements”. There’s a bit of discussion going on in the forum here as well as on Google+ about it. As always, do have a backup before proceeding—at least one user has reported new issues since the upgrade, and apparently the library is updated after the upgrade, which usually means you can not go back a version. I haven’t updated myself yet, and will run a full backup today before I do.

Here’s the fix list:

• Addresses an issue that could cause Aperture to quit unexpectedly during image import
• Nikon P7700 RAW images are now displayed correctly in the Import window
• Thumbnails with version names longer than 250 characters are now displayed correctly
• Fixes an issue that could cause multiple warning dialogs to appear when web albums are synced after waking from sleep
• Addresses an issue that could cause Aperture to quit unexpectedly when uploading photos to Photo Stream
• Shared Photo Stream invitation lists now scroll correctly
• Includes stability and performance improvements

As always you can get this via the App Store or Software Update or directly from apple.com.

If you find anything, good or bad, do tell us about it here.