Setting the Recent Project in the Library pane

You may have noticed that there is a single project name at the top of the RECENT section of the Library pane. But it doesn’t seem to ever list the most recent project you were working on. Well, almost never.

The trick is it only registers the last project double-clicked from the Projects view in the browser. Click the Projects icon in the Library pane to show all your projects in the browser window. Double-click a project in this view to update the RECENT list. If you select a project from the Library pane and start working on it, it will not update in the RECENT list.

Fastest Keystrokes for Keywords

After being in Lightroom land for the last couple of years, I have moved my photo library back to Aperture, mainly because keywording in Aperture is better and, these days, I am using Phocus from Hasselblad for all the image adjustments.

I have a backlog of thousands of old photos going back 30 years. Anything older than 8 years ago has no keywords and no description or location metadata. So, at a rate of 50 or so per day, I want to get this metadata put in—before my memory fades. So, I want it to be as easy as possible. Here is my tip that, I think is the fastest possible way to get keywords on to a bunch of images.

• Go to Aperture - Commands menu and create a short-cut key for “Add Keyword”. I use the letter “K”.
• Set up 20 keyword buttons for the keywords that I want to categories, like landscape, portrait, etc.
• Select all images shot at the same location then put in the location metadata.
• Use Command-Right Arrow to step from one image to the next.
• Click the appropriate button keyword(s).
• Click the “K” key, which activates the “Add Keyword” box.
• Type in 2 to 5 specific keywords for that image.
• Rarely need to lift the hands off the keyboard. Once you get a rhythm going, you can enter keywords almost as fast as you can type.

Regards
Peter

Small tip that helps me with Billing Jobs

I often get 3-4 places to photograph for a magazine. Sometimes they are not billed at the same time and have to be held back for the next month. I get confused on which jobs Ive billed and which ones I haven’t. This is especially true for the lower paying jobs, the High dollar ones I usually remember and bill first. Anyway I found it very helpful for my organization to add the invoice number, (from QuickBooks) to the project folder name. For example 01-10-13 PHG Rugs i2305 refers to “job date Phx Home & Garden Navajo Rugs invoice 2305” I can easily see if I have forgotten to bill something.

If there is no incoice number, then it hasn’t been billed!

How to copy (not move) an image to another project and why should I do that?

I am not sure if the following hint is mentioned somewhere in the manual but I couldn’t find it anywhere.

Before I explain the reason, here’s the simple solution.

The solution

Drag the image (it can be a version) from the browser or the viewer to the target project in the Library Inspector with the alt/option key pressed. This key press is the secret! A green plus sign near the cursor gives you the certainty that the image will not be moved but copied to the new location.

Why should I wish to have the same original in two projects?

In my case: After scanning every page of a very old photo album at high resolution (an album page with multiple photos on it, that is), I wanted to “cut out”, aka crop, every single photo to finally get a collection of separate images from that album. But I also wanted to keep the original collection of pages together at another place, to be able to browse through the pages.

That was the reason to copy the scans to a second project before starting to cut the pages.

Cutting out the images

For the cutting procedure I followed these steps (with the keyboard shortcuts in brackets): 

Select the image of the album page in the viewer:

• Choose crop [C]
• “Cut out” (crop to a single photo) and straighten [G] the first photo
• Copy the version [Option V]
• While still in the cropping mode, cut next photo
• Copy the version [Option V]
• Cut out the next photo, etc.
• End with the [Retun] key

 While viewing each of the images, you can toggle the original page where it came from as well by hitting the [M] key (master image). Nice!

Straightening tool enhanced in Aperture 3.3.2: mentioned nowhere!

Besides all the amazing enhancements in Aperture 3.3.2 already mentioned everywhere, there is one even Apple didn’t talk about (or I have missed it): the straightening tool rotates images now plus and minus 45° instead of just plus and minus 20°; which is a huge improvement.

Aperture 3.3.2’s Straighten tool now goes all the way to +/− 45°

I was ‘digitally cutting’ old photos from a scanned photobook from the first half of the last century. Many pictures were placed on the pages very oblique to the right and the left for fun. In Aperture 3.2 it was not possible to rotate them till they were horizontally (so, more than 20° rotation), therefore I had to edit them in Photoshop. But after upgrading to version 3.3.2 the problem was solved! Thank you Apple!

—Rudy