Minor Aperture Annoyances
Posted January 15th, 2007 @ 01:35pm by Erik J. Barzeski
I've begun using Aperture for anything that goes beyond the "point and shoot" variety of pictures, and I find myself annoyed with a few things that aren't a matter of my ignorance (as are most of my annoyances with the application).
Both of these annoyances have to do with the list smart searches you see to the right:
Annoyance Numero Uno
I can't delete some of the smart albums. I don't have any images from 2004, 2005, or even 2006 in Aperture. Yet Aperture will not let me delete these smart albums. They'll never be used.
Annoyance Numero Duo
I like to group my images into stacks. It makes choosing the best image from a set (the "stack pick") easy. I also dump (hit the "9" key to mark as rejected, or "X") the bad shots when going through the stacks, too.
Yet the smart search for "Rejected" doesn't look inside the stack. In fact, it only looks at the stack pick. The same is true of the other star ratings ("* or better" and "*****").
Bonus Annoyance
Imagine you create a "Flowers" keyword under "Still Life" and apply the "Flowers" keyword to an image of some roses in a vase. A search for images tagged with the "Still Life" keyword will not include the roses, despite the "Flowers" keyword being a child of the "Still Life" keyword. And Aperture supports more than one level of depth in its keywords, too.
I can see a few cases where you may want to limit the keyword hierarchy to just the actual keywords, but in most cases I'm willing to bet people would like to see their keyword hierarchy included in such a way that "Flowers" was more like "Still Life > Flowers." A simple checkbox in searches would do here: "Include Entire Hierarchy" (with better wording).
Aperture gets a lot of things right, but these three things are very, very wrong. Here's to Aperture 2.0!
Donate Life
Posted 20 Jan 2007 at 12:47pm #
[...] For now, that's where I sit. I'll continue using the checkmark until December or so, at which time I'll probably apply the keywords filter, apply a new keyword or five-star rating to all the images, and create the "2007 LB Selects" smart album at the time. Or perhaps Apple will have cleared up their keyword problems by then. [...]
Posted 26 Jan 2007 at 2:21pm #
Hi Erik,
Are you using version 1.5.2? 💡
@Annoyance Uno:
Since I do have images as far back as 2004, I won't remove that smart folder.
@Annoyance Duo:
Select the Library (or a project), hit Command-F (for Find), Select "Rating is X", make sure the Grid/List filter is set to "Select all" (or "Rejected"), check "Ignore stack groupings", and behold! All your rejected images isolated from any stack they might belong to! I've made that search into a smart album called " Rejected unstacked" (the space at the beginning of the title places the album at the top just below Library.
@Bonus Annoyance:
I can't recognize that problem. If I type in a keyword in the Cmd-F search field, all images with any child keyword are shown as well.
Cheers! 🙂
Posted 26 Jan 2007 at 3:14pm #
[quote comment="39277"]Are you using version 1.5.2?[/quote]
Yes.
[quote comment="39277"]Since I do have images as far back as 2004, I won't remove that smart folder.[/quote]
And you can't, even if you wanted to. Removing the file from them from
~/Pictures/Aperture Library.aplibrary/ Built-in Smart Albums/doesn't work, either.[quote comment="39277"]Select the Library (or a project), hit Command-F (for Find), Select "Rating is X", make sure the Grid/List filter is set to "Select all" (or "Rejected"), check "Ignore stack groupings", and behold! All your rejected images isolated from any stack they might belong to! I've made that search into a smart album called " Rejected unstacked" (the space at the beginning of the title places the album at the top just below Library.[/quote]
There is no "Ignore stack groupings" button in the individual projects. The only one I've seen is when I clicked the magnifying glass right of the "Projects" top-level item.
The "Library" is so goofed up in Aperture 1.5.2 that choosing it displays… wait for it… no images! And, a search for "Ignore Stack" in the 476-page user manual turned up a whopping zero results.
[quote comment="39277"]I can't recognize that problem. If I type in a keyword in the Cmd-F search field, all images with any child keyword are shown as well.[/quote]
You misread what I wrote and/or knowingly applied it to a simple case. What if you wanted to show items tagged beneath two separate top-level keywords? For example, "Travel" and "People." You wouldn't want to have to check off every place you've ever travelled and every type of "person."
Posted 26 Jan 2007 at 5:02pm #
Re #1:
You are probably right. And I would probably be as annoyed with this, if I didn't happen to have old images in my library. (I wonder if a folder named 2003 would appear, if I had really old images?)
Re #2:
You are right, the "ignore stack" option is only in Library. My mistake. Sorry. In my workflow a rejected image is a rejected image and must be deleted, no matter which project it belongs to. If you need to differentiate between projects, then I see the problem.
Just choosing "Library" doesn't show any images until you define a search filter. I guess this is to prevent Aperture from loading in 20,000 thumbnails each time you accidentally click on "Library".
Re #3:
I may have misunderstood you. An example: I have a top-level keyword called "outdoors". One of the many "children" of this keyword is "water", which again has a number of children (lake, river, waterfall, pool, canal, etc.). If I search the library for "water", I get all my images tagged with the child-keywords (lake, stream etc.), even though I haven't tagged a single image with the parent (water).
Posted 26 Jan 2007 at 5:04pm #
#1 revisited:
I actually do have images from 2003, but I don't get a 2003 folder. Now that is just as annoying as having too many.