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I've mentioned it before, but never as formally as this (in its own post). Aperture has the lovely ability to do two things:

1. constrain crop proportions (say, to 4:3)
2. Export images resized to a maximum height and/or width

Great. I use it in creating my Desktops as well as the 500-pixel wide images you often see here in my blog entries.

What bothers me, though, is that either the 4:3 cropping isn't being done properly, or the resizing isn't being done properly. Oftentimes, with a desktop image exported at a maximum width of 2560 and in the 4:3 format, I'll get images that are 1919, 1918, or even 1917 pixels wide rather than the 1920 I should get. The other day one of my images was exported at 2559 x 1920 ((The source was about 3500 wide, so it wasn't too small already.)).

This doesn't just happen at larger sizes. Some of my 500-pixel images export as 499 or 498.

If you're developing a website with, say, thumbnails or preview images, and they must all be 250 x 250, but some of your files are 249 x 248, or 250 x 249, you're going to lose image quality. A visitor's browser is going to stretch the image ever so slightly that the image will degrade. Also, imagine you have a vast library of images, and you want to find all the images that are 2560 x 1920. Ooops - I hope you can search for images 2555 to 2560 x 1915 to 1920.

Here's to hoping Aperture doesn't "round things off" or whatever it's doing in 2.0.

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