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Apple Dumps Most of Aperture Dev. Team
SuperMog2002 writes "An article over at Think Secret is reporting that Apple has fired much of the Aperture development team. The Shake and Motion team was assigned to work on Aperture's image processing pipeline for version 1.1. Apple has also dropped the price of Aperture from $499 to $299, and is offering those who purchased the program at $499 a $200 Apple store coupon." From the article: "Perhaps the greatest hope for Aperture's future is that the application's problems are said to be so extensive that any version 2.0 would require major portions of code to be entirely rewritten. With that in mind, the bell may not yet be tolling for Aperture; an entirely new engineering team could salvage the software and bring it up to Apple's usual standards."
Apple had a "bug-ridden" program, due to the (bad) "architecture", where the development process was a "mess" - so they fired the (whole) team responsible. Just a thought.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Well, it looks like the RAW processing was both slow and gave unacceptably poor results, the program was buggy and at least one review called it 'unusable in its current form.'
an entirely new engineering team could salvage the software and bring it up to Apple's usual standards.
For a reference, the "Apple's usual standards for software" are "the best application in the Universe" (tm), that's tought to achieve.
They might as well fire all of their Windows ports division as well, QuickTime/iTunes on Windows is a piece of cr*p.
There's a good list of bugs at ars's review of aperture
The one people complained about most is the thumbnails not matching the actual image (and there's reports of this happenning in iPhoto too).
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
I heard they're bringing Woz back to fix it all up nice and purty...
This guy's the limit!
Before posting conspiracy theories and such, you may want to read what others have to say.
Check out Ars Technica's Aperture 1.0 reviwe:
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/apps/aperture.ars
... isn't it? Although I use a Mac Mini most of the time, my work PC with Windows 2000 makes some beautiful music with the latest version of iTunes. What's so bad about it? Seems to function precisely as it does in Mac OSX, my iPod syncs beautifully, etc ... what makes it so awful?
I remember installing QuickTime and some of the preferences are a wee bit clunky, but no more so than **chuckle** Windows Media Player **shudder**.
I don't think anyone's saying that Aperture 1.0 had some bugs and problems (as a 1.0 release of a MAJOR product), and the recently released major update, Aperture 1.1, addresses many of these (not to mention making the application Universal for PowerPC and Intel).
Apple may feel that Aperture's architecture needs to be completely retooled, but it's not going to kill one of its pro software products that has been out for mere months, especially one that was desired as much as Aperture. Apple just needs to figure out internally which teams are going to be responsible for ongoing development and/or retooling.
Yes, Aperture has had mixed reviews, but many people already love it and are basing their entire workflows on it. It's not like it's the incapable piece of utter shit Think Secret makes it out to be. (Gotta love Think Secret's sensationalism lately...must be bitter about becoming progressively more and more wrong about almost all of their pre-event predictions.)
They were probably being forced to document the code so their successors know where to look for specific screwups.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
Not an Aperture user, but I was struck by the review in Popular Photography that made some apologies for the horsepower needed to run it. Yes, imaging is tough, but the program was apparently too slow to test unless it was installed on the absolutely most-tricked-out, highly-upgraded Power Mac G5 you can lay your hands on. Usually, the creampuff reviews from such magazines will give this sort of thing only the barest mention. The fact that the review actually talked about it for a few sentences told me that the program had problems.
I really hate having to read between the lines of reviews from mainstream outfits. That's why I love my online sources.
No, its for batch processing large numbers of RAW pictures. There is a freee plugin for Photoshop to do that same sort of thing, but you cant compare the two in terms of feature sets. One is hack to add some basic RAW processing features to Photoshop. With some issues worked out, Aperture would be a god-send to photographers that work with RAW format pics. Adobe has since released a beta of a piece of software to compete with aperture, but i forget its name.
We're saying here that a good strategy for a piece of softwares survival is to make it so bad that someone will be compelled to rewrite it?
No, we're saying that if your software is so bad that you actually have to apologize to people who bought it with cash than it might be a good survival strategy to rewrite it.
KFG
Apple is rebating for software already sold, because it isn't good enough for their standards? My god, what would happen if Microsoft had to live by these standards?
Guess their partners weren't strategic enough.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
Just an observation: Apple's website's frontpage ad for the new 17" MacBookPro has Aperture on it's screen. If Aperture was so crap and dead as some are suggesting Apple woundn't use it in their advertising for their latest flagship product.
www.tribalnetworks.org - helping tribal people around the world to own their own means of high-tech communications
lightroom: http://labs.macromedia.com/technologies/lightroom/
and the beta is better than the aperture release version
no windows beta at this point, sorry
Adobe/Macromedia does have a direct competitor, It's called Lightroom and is also in beta. http://labs.macromedia.com/technologies/lightroom/
Last time I checked, you don't get 'dumped' because your code was amazing.
Well, at Microsoft apparently you don't get dumped because your code sucked. That's the difference.
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
...perhaps they should fire the Quicktime team too?
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, YES, YES PLEASE!
Quicktime is such an utter piece of shit. This coming both from the perspective of a user and a developer.
Considering the ongoing litigation "Apple vs. Does" and the fact that "Nick de Plume" of Think Secret fame may be involved, I wouldn't believe ANY information coming out of Think Secret.
From what I've seen, Aperture is a great application that stumbled out of the blocks with some performance issues and fairly poor handling of many devices' RAW formats. The 1.1 update has resolved the bulk of these issues.
If Aperture has any problem, it's that it is a solution in search of a problem. Most amateur photographers' needs are met with iPhoto. Most professional digital photographers are slow to adopt new technologies, because they directly impact the bottom line. It takes time to learn new applications and new methods of working; time that could be better spent working with clients and making money.
Aperture also has direct competition in the form of Adobe Lightroom.
In any case, I find it highly unlikely that Apple has dissolved the development team for an application that just released a 1.1 update and a universal binary to positive reviews. And with the recent price drop, Apple clearly wants to get this application in the hands of the users.
Think Secret is wrong on this one. Perhaps they are wrong on purpose. Could they be intentionally smearing the application in the press? Were they paid off to do so by Adobe?
Hmmm.
Bibble is better, and was started by one guy in his garage that wanted some decent SW for the raw files coming off of his digital camera. At least four developers have touched it over the years...i.e. small, smart and agile development team. I think they're pretty cool. The principal developer/entrepreneur Eric Hyman gladly does the support, and he's a very nice guy besides. The SW is QT based and they do extensive testing on Mac (their professional customer base), Linux (where they get many helpful comments) and Windows. They have a freeware version. The whole series of changes you make to an image are stored as an .XML file, which lets you edit it and script a systematic image-processing stream to apply to whole shoots once you pointy-clicky on a representative image to see what works. Reputed to have the best white-balance algorithm in the business. They're usually the first to decode a new obfuscated raw file format for new cameras, too.
Well, there's something to be said for Apple's decision here. Not many companies (that I have had dealings with) would offer a $200 rebate to everyone who bought a product just because the product was not up to par. Firing the team responsible, plus this rebate, is the kind of mea culpa companies, especially computer-related companies, hardly ever provide. (Granted, the rebate as an Apple coupon is a little unfortunate, but I wouldn't complain about that too much.)
It's hard not to compare this to MS (M$ if you prefer), considering how many times there have been calls for the heads of various decision-makers/teams/ec., and how unrepentant Microsoft has been when their products suck. Not to say they always suck, by any means, but they are the biggest target out their, and a juicy one on this topic.
"Last time I checked, you don't get 'dumped' because your code was amazing."
Of course, no one here is praising the team that got dumped. They are praising the way Apple handled this problem, and bashing MS because many think (rightly, it seems to me) that Microsoft would not have responded at all like this.
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
Aperture pegs both processors on an MBP but then so does Lightroom.... as to bugs there are about 13,000 posts on the Apple discussion site http://discussions.apple.com/index.jspa and there are probably about the same number in the Lightroom forums.... while I like most Apple apps I've been using Lightroom (so far) but it has its own "features".... both apps still seem like betas to me, both Apple and Adobe are going with interfaces unlike those in their other apps and each approach has some pluses and minuses.......... with millions of dslrs out there and more being bought every day there is a real market for this type of app and $299 is a lot less than the price of a lens (at least I get edu prices on apps if not lenses)
For years now there's been competition between the two companies in one spot or another. Adobe's CEO, Bruce Chizen, made some rather cutting remarks a few years back about the Mac OS generally, and last April described the relationship as "like a marriage where you're in it for the kids." Adobe generally has grown in Windows markets more than with the Mac -- with products like Acrobat -- and has made a point of saying so.
Quark, meanwhile, took so long to be OS X compatible that they caused the entire world of graphic designers to be incredibly wary of upgrading anything at all now.
"Strategic" decisions aren't immutable. Notice the chips Apple is shipping in its latest machines.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
The fact is, RAW data doesn't look very good, but Apple showed it with as little alteration as possible, because customers had said that's what they wanted. The RAW importer in Aperture 1.0 showed what was really there, without the prettying-up that the cameras do when they convert to JPEG, or that Photoshop does when it coverts RAW to TIFF.
Several reviewers, including the clown at ARS technica who is admittedly not a pro photographer, and had probably never seen RAW data in his life, complained that it didn't look like images that had been through Adobe's converter.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
That is entirely incorrect.
Photoshop is an image manipulation tool. Aperture is a tool for professional photographers and photo editors (I don't mean people who manipulate photos, I mean people in editorial positions who select photos to be used for a purpose -- think "the photo editor at the New York Times" type of position) that has its strengths in managing RAW image files as if they were JPEGs like iPhoto can. It has phenomenal capabilities around metadata and managing a large library, and offers the basic correction tools that photographers would need (exposure, color correction, saturation, contrast, sharpening, etc.).
There is little to no overlap with Photoshop, nor is there any evidence that Aperture has been "killed."
I happen to be a photographer, and have the problems that Aperture solved. At an event, I might easily shoot over 800 exposures. Before Aperture it would take me at least a day or two to sort through them and make my selects. At an event a week ago, I was able to sort through 762 exposures and pull out about 120 selects in under two hours. It has more than paid for itself many times over in productivity savings.
Chris -- http://www.bitter.net/
When I read the article on ThinkSecret, which is entirely a rumor, I thought to myself "I wonder how long it will take for this unfounded rumor to spread as if it were fact through the Internet like wildfire." Well, obviously the answer to that is not very long.
It's also obvious that whoever wrote the ThinkSecret article hasn't actually used Aperture. While Aperture is not perfect it does many thing much better than anyone else and some things that no else does. It's multi-monitor support is better than any other application on the market. And its photo organization and rating features are among the best. In my opinion Aperture was designed very well. Sure there are bugs, but it's only at 1.1 right now which is a good improvement over 1.0.
I don't think that Aperture will be going away any time soon.
infested with jello like fishes no melotron wishes
I know two of the engineers who wrote Aperture. They have both moved to other groups, one to Application Frameworks, and one to CoreImage. In each case, their new job is a higher-profile position. If there had been a round of firings of the Aperture developers, I would have heard about it.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Don't forget, this is Think Secret, who hasn't been right about anything for nine months now. Where is our touchscreen video iPod, our Mac mini PVR, our "iPhone," etc.?
It's weird how in tech journalism, you can get away with being wrong about nearly everything for almost a year and still get your stories read.
"Sufferin' succotash."
I think before you put TOO much weight on the Ars review, you should take into consideration what jcr said above, because I think it's an important point.
Saying that Aperture's output isn't as pretty as Photoshop's is like complaining that your photos look shittier on slides than on prints, without taking into consideration that with the slide you're looking at your own (and the camera's) handiwork and nothing else, while with the print you're looking at something that's been optimized by someone else (the printer) to look good.
The speed problems are unacceptable though. I just thought the Aperture/Photoshop comparison wasn't a great one; although it's odd to say it, Photoshop has become a "mid grade" application, I think Aperture was going for an even 'more-pro' crowd than the average Photoshop user.
I think in retrospect Apple is realizing maybe that market is smaller than they originally thought.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Posting anonymously for obvious reasons.
Most of the team was not fired, they simply found new positions in Apple once 1.0 was completed because the project management was too shoddy. For instance I am now back working on Mac OS X. Most of the management however has been fired.
Aperture is not being abandoned but is just being reorganised.
Many of the problems in Aperture were caused, not fixed, by the Shake and Motion teams contributions. Originally the rendering pipeline, based on Core Image, was working fine but it was decided to speed it up so over a period of 4 months it was rewritten. It has never worked correctly since then.
I've been on quite a few software project ranging from small to big over the last few years.
Most of the time, if the entire thing requires a complete re-write, its not because the individual programmers are bad, its because of a lack of organization and planning at the beginning stages. Could be the fault of a team leader or lead architect (or whatever terms you choose to use).
It's easy to program, its hard to design software in a well organized, modular, scalable way. And it requires good leadership... Apple is more immature than I thought.
I think you've accidentally replied to the wrong post.
I didn't say "Aperture's output isn't as pretty as Photoshop's" or mention the speed problem - the only bug I specifically mentioned was the thumbnailing one.
This application is designed to speed processing of thousands of photos. If the thumbnails don't match the picture then it is unusable.
I note that I am the only Mac Fanboy in this discussion who's mentioned that particular bug. Everyone else seems to be concentrating on Aperture's other shortomings.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Except that these are bugs for Aperture 1.0. Now that 1.1 has been released I wonder how many of these are still an issue.
Also, there are problems with the Ars review. It starts out by saying that "Aperture is not a competitor to Photoshop" but then goes on to review Aperture as if it were a competitor to Photoshop. Basically it glosses over some of Aperture's strongest features, completely leaving out many of them, and then compares Aperture directly with Photoshop. The reviewer forgets that Aperture is not a competitor to Photoshop.
Most of the negative reviews of Aperture are done be people that don't actually understand that it is not Photoshop. And most of the positive reviews of Aperture are by people that understand what it should be used for. Understand your tools and use the right one for the specific job you need to do.
infested with jello like fishes no melotron wishes
The flamefest at Ars Technica about that was actually quite informative. RAW really is a raw dump of Camera sensors and looks like nothing without being "prettyed-up". So's apparently it is incorrect to say that Apple wasn't manipulating the RAW, they just weren't doing it to the same level of other products.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
"customers had said that's what they wanted." That's something as a software engineer I learned years ago. Customers don't really know what they want. What you have to do is work with the and get to know them well enough that you get to know what they need. Aperture was not a total failure. It does most of what isneeded but Version 1.0 was not at all ready to be realeased. Aple should have done what Adobe did with Lightroom. They called the first release "Beta" and made it a free download. Adobe gets comments from real customers and no one is upset with Adobe because they didn't pay anything. But Adobe gets free feedback from real users The other thing in Apple's favor is that no one knows what one of these kinds of programs should do. Spreadsheets are mature, we know what one should do but these "raw workflow programs"? What are they? Apple was breaking new ground and taking a risk. Get them credit for that.
Actually, it is pretty bad.
That's just a small smatterng of the problems I've found with 1.1...
Please help metamoderate.
Actually, when using Aperture the Graphics card is the most important part of your machine. You don't need the fastest G5 with 4 or 8 GB of memory (though it always helps), what you need is a very fast Graphics card. This has been very hard for many people to understand because traditional programs like Photoshop rely almost solely on the CPU for their speed. Aperture is an entirely different program because it relies very heavily on the GPU for its speed.
I'd guess that the low end G5 (Dual-core 2.0 GHz) with an NVIDIA 7800 GT would probably outperform a Quad 2.5 GHz G5 with the stock NVIDIA 6600 graphics card. Not to say that the NVIDIA 6600 performs badly in Aperture, it doesn't, but the 7800 should perform much better, even in a slower machine. Also, the ATI Radeon 9600 Pro which was the default GPU in many of the earlier G5s doesn't perform very well in Aperture. For people with this card you don't need a new/better/faster G5 so much as you just need a better GPU.
When you do have a good graphics card Aperture performs very, very well.
infested with jello like fishes no melotron wishes
Remember that even the camera itself does quite a bit of processing to clean each image before saving it as a JPEG, so it could be argued applying those same algorithms to the RAW version of the image would be a different version of "faithful". Sometimes a computer can truly make an image look better without sacrificing detail and without being unfaithful to the original image.
The rumour/inside dope I got was, an untouchable star was put in charge of Aperture. He could do no wrong because of a reputation gained from another project, but the rep was built off the backs of others who had covered for his serious coding and management deficiencies.
He was given free reign with Aperture, and since it was built from scratch, the projects structural flaws were built in from the beginning, without anyone having the clout to say "Hey, somethings wrong!". Nobody in the company knew nothing until around the first public demonstration, when it looked awfully pretty, but was nowhere near ready to be handed off to market. With a clear picture of what a mess the project was (and the star floating above the fray, unsullied of course), upper management gutted every other project to get SOMETHING shipped in time. So Aperture shipped, who knows if the star's status will be re-evaluated, and NAB gets less of an Apple splash because of all the talent diverted to clean up a mess,
The major problem, of course is that Aperture originated within Apple. Name a great piece of Apple software (OS X, FCP, Shake, iTunes). It was brought in from elswhere and given a pretty face. Stuff that was created from scratch--ignore until version 3.0
DVD Studio 1.5 was a steaming pile of **** and at $999 was a poorly layed-out, extremely confusing and unfinished application, basically it was little better than the raw app Apple picked up from Macromedia.
Half a version number and $500 less you have DVD Studio Pro 2, a complete rewrite that is easy to use, very well organized and works as advertised. The later versions get even better.
Apple seems to know when to throw away a dead end project and start again (Copland ring a bell?), and although I personally don't think Apperture is all that bad, I did think that it was too expensive at the original $499 price. I expect great things from Apperture 2.0
I have a studio, I shoot professionally every day. I run aperture on a Quad G5 with 8gigs of RAM it has been the best peice of image management software to date. The workflow is increadable. Yes the raw quality isn't as good as adobe's Camera Raw but adobe's wasn't as great in its first version either. The quality is 95% there. Yes there were some bugs and with any new software a learning curve (which scares most people) but honestly everything runs fine for me and it has cut my post production time and image management time 75% Also when i bring clients in i can whip photos around on two apple Cinema Displays with ease make selects in 15min normally, and there's the wow factor of images flying around (clients like blinking lights and razzle dazzle). What apple "Did" with their team is what apple does. Makes the best software availible bar none. This isn't for this article but lets face it they make the best desktop system bar none. They don't settle for 95% they settle for 110% (10% being the extra things they invented that you need but didn't know you needed untill they showed them to you). I personally think fireing it had a lot to do with the level of hardware needed to run it lets be honest how many times have you programed something and it chokes on your parents 5 yo comp but runs perfectly on yours. At anyrate if you buy a new $5k~20k camera every 2~3 years you can pony up for a Quad G5 to get the job done.
I use Aperture daily, along with photoshop and the other programs you'd expect a professional photographer to use heavily. Since the release of the 1.1 update several weeks ago, I can honestly say that Aperture is one of the nicer apps I use on a regular basis. But prior to that, Aperture was already saving me more time (read: $$) than any other tool I have.
Aperture is designed to let me import hundreds of photos from a shoot, in RAW, jpeg, whatever, QUICKLY add metadata, rate, sort, color correct for white balance, exposure etc.. This gets me to the point where I can now proof the images to my clients. The photos haven't been retouched, they are just in the form that lets a client see my skill as a photographer, and what images they have to choose from.
No matter who the client is, commercial, fashion, wedding, headshot... the faster I can let them see the proofs the better. From the 500 images in an average session... the client will only choose a few, which are then retouched in photoshop. I think this is what is hard for non-photographers to grasp; the sheer number of images NOT used. The workflow is designed to select only a few choice images, and then begin your post production processing of those selected images.
In many cases, especially with studio sessions, nothing really needs retouching after the image has been "tuned" in Aperture. Many times I'm sending the image versions directly from aperture to my lab printer. It is wonderful to use the Soft Proofing built-in to Aperture. It works great.
An important, but often overlooked core feature of Aperture is its top notch asset management system with versioning. Sure Subversion and CVS do version management better, but many of my colleagues have trouble with the concepts behind webmail, so Apertures simplicity in this area is admirable. I expect many new features will be added to the versioning and Vault system (like multiple library support), but much of what it does already is a major time saver. There are certainly alternatives, like lightroom, and bibble, which are each excellent in their own ways, but Aperture is more complete, and meets my needs better for now. Your mileage mat vary.
Lastly, I'm running Aperture on a G4 Powerbook. It runs fine. My RAW files are between 15Mb and 20Mb in size, and Aperture handles the hundreds of images per session fine. Could it be faster? Sure, what couldn't. But its not the nightmare that some report.
I keep seeing references to the "non-pro" "clown over at Ars Technica" who reviewed Aperture, but you know what, I thought the Ars review was quite solid, not only because his reasons for his opinions were legitimate, but also because his conclusions were corroborated by many other reviewers who have more "cred." I HAVE worked with RAW files, and after reading his review I concluded that the Ars review was fine.
jcr also reveals his own lack of knowledge about RAW by claiming that "The RAW importer in Aperture 1.0 showed what was really there, without the prettying-up..." That is flat-out wrong. RAW files have no intrinsic appearance. They are a single-channel grayscale file that is interpreted into three-channel RGB. There is no such thing as an "unaltered" RAW file because every RAW file must be interpreted using a set of assumptions. Every RAW converter is coded with its own set of assumptions as to what a "good" image looks like. It is much like printing from color negative film (as opposed to color positive film).
You need to understand that in order to understand the next point. Because there can be no "reference image," there really is no 100% right or wrong interpretation. So how could Aperture make an image that looks "right" with respect to user expectations? For that you have to understand what user expectations are based on. User expectations are based on the conversion performed by each camera maker's own RAW converter. Those are the individual targets Apple tried to hit.
The Adobe converter engineers, on the other hand, believe that most camera software makes images that have too much contrast and clipping and lack shadow detail. In other words, Adobe believes most camera defaults are aimed at making nice snapshots. The Adobe converter's interpretation is based on this philosophy. A certain number of users believe the Adobe conversions look better. Those who believe (rightly or wrongly) that the camera maker's interpretation are gospel tend to think the Adobe conversions look worse and Aperture looks better.
Every default raw conversion will involve a certain amount of image processing, sharpening, etc. that was not present in the original RAW data, and it is for that reason and the reasons in the previous paragraphs that jcr's statement is incorrect.
No. The reverse psychology works in this case and counteracts the effect. :-) The moderation system is real easy to manipulate, if one so desires. Saying "go on, mod me down" usually takes you up a level or two.
Mind you, having posted this, all bets are off now.
1. Doesn't remember where I was in the playlist when I shut it down. That's fine if you always randomize, but I have hundreds of tracks in my collection and most of them are meant to be played in sequence (ambient, classical, etc.).
2. Ogg support sucks. I had to install a 3rd-party plugin, and there's noticable pauses at the beginnings of ogg tracks.
3. Has a system tray icon, but still appears in the taskbar.
4. Doesn't use global HID-device keys. For example, winamp pauses when i hit the pause key, no matter what application is in the foreground. iTunes doesn't.
5. Slow startup. Can be up to a minute. I found forum posts that suggested that this could be "worked around" by not having the cd burner device start up. Come on.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
BTW, hell has started to freeze when a Mac user switches to WinTel for a Graphics/Photo app.
damaged by dogma
The look-and-feel *is* a Mac UI. It's the ProKit UI that tries to maximise the space available, because, well, you've got a limited screen space and a lot of media to show. Every Pro-App uses this look and feel.
The 'fast+easy' is supposition on your part, and the system is IMHO anyway not meant to be a backup, it's meant to be snapshot-in-time of what you wanted to save. If you want to back stuff up in a more-permanent way, there is always the (free download) Apple Backup application.
Well, yes, I can see that happening pretty easily. With only 1G of RAM and doing RAW conversion to an in-memory form (which is completely uncompressed), I could easily see it taking more than 1G, therefore swapping out other programs to disk, and incurring a wait as they are swapped back in when you want to do something. I can't see any way around that for the application...
Are you trying to say that you want 700 folders ? If you want to separate masters, create a 'smart album' (which is an album consisting of the results of a search) and specify the search to limit the album to the image you want. Admittedly this will get tedious for 700 items, but I can't really see the advantage of 700 separate folders anyway.
Perhaps an Applescript could be written for your situation, so Aperture could be told to create smart-searches based on a criteria (eg: pathname-to-original-directory) for all distinct instances of that criteria. That oughtn't be too hard - then you just get one project and your 700 smart-folders inside.
Agreed. This is a pain.
To be fair, that would be rather hard unless it was 'have applied *any* rotation/crop/etc.', and I'm not sure how useful that
Like every other "Pro" application, Apple seems to throw the entire Mac UI out the window. All the UI elements get tiny, and start behaving strangely. Dialog boxes you can't escape out of look like Windoids- and in one case, I hit "delete" while a text field wasn't selected in the Windoid, and Aperture trapped the delete in the main window instead, and deleted a photo! What the?
The reason non-modal dialogues are used heavily in Pro apps is because they are more flexible, and offer a much faster workflow rather than having to cancel dialogues, do something, and re-open the same dialogue. Also Aperture makes use of a number of floating windows (HUD's) to maximize use of screen space since they can be quickly brought up or dispelled.
The Apple pro interface has been refined over some time in other apps like Final Cut, it too comes from a base of practical use just like the Apple Guidelines but is intended for a more experienced user with more complex needs.
The backup system sucks- you can't archive anything conveniently (you have to export projects by hand, remember where you put them, etc). That flies in the face of how almost every pro photographer works. Aperture instead only allows you to basically rsync the Aperture folder (oops, I mean, Library) to another disk, aka "Vault", and if you delete a "master", on the next sync, it deletes it from the "Vault" as well. There is no way to reconcile specific differences from Vaults; it's an all-or-nothing system to make it as fast+easy to implement as possible.
It's meant to point out to users who might not be backing up as often as they should the importance of backup by making it a first-class citizen. And yes it removes something from the vault if you've removed it from the library, why wouldn't it? It does store everything removed in a "deleted" folder on the Vault drive in case you made a mistake. Also, As the Aperture instructions point out you are supposed to be making multiple Vault copies and keeping some offsite.
I don't think it's fair to slap Aperture for trying to promote good backup practices when few other apps do anything at all to even help you with backups.
You create a project. You have 700 photos. You've already sorted them, or they are different days, etc. Anyway- you want to logically seperate them out and only have ONE master in ONE folder. Nope, sorry, can't do that- masters reside in the Project all together. If you import a folder with 6 subfolders, the main folder is created as a folder, and the subfolders are created as "albums". The wonderful joy with albums is that a "version" can be in multiple albums.
What does it matter if all the pictures are in a project, as you noted you want to logically seperate them - which you can do with albums.
The main idea is to have folder structures with projects at the leaf nodes. If you're putting everything in one project you're using the product in a way it was not meant to be used.
What's wrong with having versions in multiple albums? I WANT versions to be able to be in multiple albums. You can of course just have it in one if you like. I fail to see why you want to limit flexibility of the product in this way.
You can't use != in any of the smart folder/album/whatevers. Let's say I want to find all images in my project that I haven't tagged with "adjusted" (more on why this is necessary below); I can't.
IPTC keyword search, "does not contain".
Aperture lets you assign plenty of metadata, but can't make smart folders based on steps in a workflow. I import an image, rank it, then adjust it, fix rotation, crop, etc. I want to be able to set up smart folders based on those steps to show me only what is left to do in any particular category. Nope! I have to create custom metadata buttons/tags to do it.
That would be a good idea, what other applications today help you in that regard?
Stack multiple adjustments, and Aperture turns into a total pig loading the photo. Some ad
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Personally I think that your reply makes perfect sense, and I'll add that if the camera manufacturers were so sure of themselves they would not think there would be any point in producing RAW files out of their cameras (TIFF would be adequate).
On the contrary, new methods and algorithms to produce better output out of the Bayer-like mosaic of most sensors are published if not every week at least at each new major Image Processing conference. The whole point of RAW is to allow future such algorithms to be used on older images.
Obviously with Lightroom out already in beta, Apple is now in a competition that they probably won't win because of the huge advantages Adobe has in leveraging Photoshop and cross-platform flow.
All that Lightroom can really borrow though is the conversion engine (ACR) whcih they already have - as far as the other features Aperture has there's really not much Lightroom can borrow from Photoshop, because it's a fundamnetally different kind of applciation not built for working on pixels.
I would say Lightroom is at least a year behind having something that comes close to being as useful, just based on progress in the betas so far. And some things they have no plans to add at all right now, like the book designer in Aperture.
Don't forget also that Lightroom has to worry about dual platform support which always slows you down.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Actually core image is used quite heavily by Aperture, so it lends credence to your not knowing anything about Aperture but lends doubt to you being the original poster.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley