About a year ago I switched from Lightroom as my Photo Viewer/Editor of choice to Apple’s Aperture. I’ve really come to love the Aperture system overall, but there are a few Lightroom tools I really wished we had in Aperture. Tanya has stuck with Lightroom and the two of us using different software programs has made things problematic now and again, so I recently suggested to her we get on the same program. Ok, room for a joke here. Yea she suggested I get on her program. One of those husband-wife things. I persevered as any good husband would not do.

Her first question was, “can I get the captions to show under each thumbnail?” Her reason for asking this is based on the system she uses in Lightroom where she can see the caption that is attached to each image running across the top of the thumbnail. The benefit of this is she can easily see which images have been captioned and those that have not been captioned. I was not sure about her request and so I reached out to an Apple acquaintance who works on the Aperture software team. Thankfully after a few back and forth emails, he got me setup and I wanted to share the procedure with you. It can really reduce the confusion level of adding captions to your images if you can see at a glance what been done and what hasn’t.

View of Lightroom with captions on the thumbnails in Grid View

The following are the images and emails correspondence from my Apple source:

Yes, it’s very easy… you can have whatever you want in there…

Metadata View option in the lower right corner of the Aperture screen

Browser & Viewer Metadata option screen

Add whatever data you need…

Select the options you want to show on the Grid Mode

Although this all seemed really straight forward I could not get the caption to appear with all the options checked properly etc. Finally after a lot of trial and error I moved the caption field from its original position in the list to the top position on the list and viola, the captions appeared on the thumbnails.

I moved the Caption field from fifth to number ONE

Not sure why, but if there are fields ahead of the field you want to show on the thumbnail, the one you want doesn’t show. I’ve requested an update to have Aperture show all the fields in line form below the thumbnails. Maybe we’ll see it in Aperture 4. You would definitely have to manage that but why not have the option.

Thanks to Martin for the help.

Greetings everybody. What a glorious day as I type this post, head phones on and jamming out to Steele Dan. It’s a cool September afternoon and I’m happy to be back in Montana. I love traveling but it’s always great to get home.

I was doing a little web surfing this afternoon and found something you folks who are using Aperture might like to know about. It’s a company called Graphic Node. They’re out of Lithuania and they specialize in creating several different Mac related templates including some for Aperture. Aperture comes with a few templates of its own but it’s always nice to have other options so you might want to check these out. I actually had a custom template created   for our business Natural Exposures, Inc. that matches our web site’s design. A young man from Missoula, Montana did the custom CSS for us on that project. His name is Scott Rouse and you can get to his Facebook page by clicking the link to his name. A custom web page is a bit more costly but well worth it to help set your work off from others in photography world. Let me kow if you have any questions or any suggestions.

A sample of the custom template I had desgined by Scott Rouse

The image below was first run as part of my final post for our Arctic Documentary Project in Svalbard/Spitsbergen, Norway. It’s kind of buried in the main blog so I though I would pull this out for easier reading. The key elements I used to create this image include the Nikon D7000, Nikon SB900 wireless flash, Aperture software and Nik Viveza that was used as a plugin within Aperture.

A skeleton of a Svalbard Reindeer lies relatively undisturbed on the tundra of Spitsbergen, Norway.

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I thought I would share with  you some lessons I learned recently with regards to protecting your pictures. About three weeks ago I had a major Drobo hard drive failure where I had nearly 3 Terabytes of images go up in smoke. Thank goodness I had them all backed up in two other places. As I discuss this I’m not holding back any names in reference to equipment that may have failed me. More importantly I also won’t be holding back with explaining MY missteps that most likely were the root cause for the equipment failures. Both the products that were involved in this disastrous melt down, Drobo FS and Aperture, are products I still firmly believe in and will continue to use. The key to discussing this is to encourage each and everyone reading this blog to make sure you understand all the details and limitations of your equipment or software to avoid a catastrophic implosion like I had.

Unsupported File Variant! Not the warning you wever want to see.

It all began with a good friend of mine from Apple giving me a DroboPro FS Direct Attached Storage Array. I’ve had it for over a year now and it has always been a great device. It was an amazingly kind gesture on my friends part. I’ve been a big fan of Drobo since they first released their first Drobo product. However, as they’ve progressed so have the connection options that Drobo offers. My lack of understanding Drobo’s new ISCSI/Ethernet connection port took me down a four week road I have no interest in traveling again.

That green wire is an ISCSI/Ethernet connection cable. Beware

ISCSI/Ethernet is a relatively new connection for hard drives and other peripherals that gives you tremendous band width for moving large files. Moving digital photos is always a headache since the files are so large and the transfers so time consuming. When the ISCSI/Ehernet option appeared I was elated. On paper ISCSI is a bit faster than Firewire 800 and I’m always looking for speed when it comes to photography and video production. But my elation turned to frustration, aggravation and had I not backed everything up, most likely starvation! My Drobo FS with over 3 TB’s of images became corrupted after it lost connection to my Mac Pro during a transfer of large files. Whenever a drive disconnects during a transfer process your chances of corruption are almost 100%. Actually it disconnected three different times during the transfer and after each disconnect it restarted, then took off where it had stopped all on its own. After the third time I thought, “Holy Mackerel this is not good” or something to that effect. Have to admit it may have been a bit more colorful than that but my mother reads these blogs so you get the idea.

ISCSI/Ethernet ports on the back of a DroboFS

Anyhow, long story short, even though the Drobo was restarting and taking up where it left off, in reality  it was slowly dieing. The shut downs during transfer were apparently due to the ISCSI connection. I called Apple and the minute I explained how I had the Drobo connected, they immediately told me that ISCSI/Ethernet is not supported from within Aperture. I prodded a bit further since I knew that Aperture wasn’t supported over a network but what I really wanted to clarify was. “is ISCSI/Ethernet plugged directly to the computer considered over a network?” and the answer was, “Yes, Aperture does not support Ethernet connections and that’s what ISCSI is. Your disconnects are directly related to ISCSI/Ethernet not being able to establish and provide a quality transfer of digital data.”  So there was my answer directly from Apple.  Needless to say I’ve switched back over to Firewire 800, the fastest connection I have on my current equipment. Back to a little slower connection but hopefully much more stable. I can’t wait until Thunderbolt hits the market in mass. I’ll be upgrading my Mac Pro and a new storage unit to make good use of the blazing speeds Thunderbolt will provide. Lets all just hope this never happens again to me or any of you out there reading this blog. If it does I know I’ll be looking for a new storage device.

One of my favorite Blogs for all things Apple is 9-5Mac Apple Intelligence. They recently posted a story about a patient application that suggests we may see the IPad running some form of Aperture in the future. Those of you who follow our Corkboard/Blog know that this has been a desire of mine since I switched over to Aperture. You can read more about my experience with the IPad as tool for photography in my Vietnam-Cambodia Blog entries. Click on the image below to read the article. Can’t wait to see this all come together. Hope they are right.

Apple revolutionizes digital photography workflow with the release of Aperture 1.0

One of the most difficult aspects of the digital photography workflow is finding software that helps us process thousands and thousands of captured images. Back in the mid 90′s when the internet came alive and gave us the opportunity to present our images like never before, I was introduced to Photoshop. And from day one I’ve had a love/hate relationship with a program that is not only exceptionally expensive but equally as bloated. Time passed and in October of 2005 Apple did the photography world a huge favor and introduced Aperture. I had always wondered why there wasn’t a better way for photographers that had no interest in creating photos in a computer. Why those if us who wanted only to tweak our images, fine tuning the essentials such as exposure, white balance, removing dust, correcting a horizon line etc. were forced to buy a program that should have been called DesignerShop rather than Photoshop. Why was there not something better? Aperture was invented and we were given the answer.

Amazingly, once Aperture was released, Adobe sees the light (no pun intended) and brings us Lightroom. Geez…. how did that happen so fast? Pretty suspicious that all those years we were forced to pay north of $700.00, plus expensive upgrades and when the competition brings us a new, much cheaper way of working with our images, Adobe all of a sudden has something similar. Whatever the reason we now have two exceptionally powerful ways to work with our photography outside of Photoshop and beside Photoshop if needed.

So with that bit of history behind us I want to introduce you to what I’m calling Aperture Applets. Aperture Applets will be an ongoing section of my Blog that I’ll be dedicating to tips, tricks, suggestions, ideas etc. that relate to the workflow of Apple’s revolutionary photographic software, Aperture. I realize that many of you are using either Photoshop or Lightroom but many more are seeing the advantages that Apple’s Aperture offers. In fact I too was using Lightroom for many years. Part of the history I left out above was the fact that I was not happy with the initial release of Aperture. It was buggy and was missing a number of necessary items needed for quality digital workflow. So for several years I moved over to Lightroom . However, with the release of Aperture 3 and it’s ability to work seamlessly with video, I was once again back in the Aperture camp. For those of you interested in finding out more about some of the tools I’m using to keep up to speed with Aperture you can see my earlier post that highlights other blogs and the Aperture book. In the future, all things Aperture  on out Corkboard/Blog, will be under the heading of Aperture Applets. You can select the Aperture Applets category to see all things Aperture when you want to quickly eliminate other posts.

I hope you enjoy and find useful the information I’ll be providing. Please do me a favor and feel free to respond via the blog. I’m open to all your suggestions, questions or anything else that revolves around Aperture and photography.  Be well and welcome to Aperture Applets.