I think I may have been a bit too harsh on my previous Aperture post.
Now that I have had more time to spend with it, I am re-energized about using it as a tool.
I’m a hands-on type of person so I prefer to try out an application before I read the documentation. I believe that experiencing what features you don’t know how to use in the application makes you focus more on these areas when reading the documentation. This applies to tutorials as well. Unfortunately, when I first started using Aperture I ran into some issues right away that were quite frustrating. In fact, they made me question whether Aperture was going to be a usable tool for me. However, I continued working with it to give it a fair shake (and due to it’s cost!).
After working with it for a little while I got to the point where it was time for me to read some documentation. In particular I watched the tutorial DVD that came with Aperture all the way through. The tutorial showed off several functions which I had not discovered in my testing that relieved some of my greatest frustrations.
For instance, in the default settings, Aperture doesn’t let you perform image operations like rotation on multiple images at the same time. The operation only affects the “primary select” instead of all the images that are selected. However, there is a mode change “Toggle Primary Only” that you can use that changes the behavior so that you can perform operations on multiple images. (‘S’ is the shortcut for this btw)
So I highly recommend watching the tutorial. It was quite a good overview of Aperture.
But what about the bug that I talked about in my previous Aperture post?
Well, my friend Benjamin Yu figured out a work around for it.
He suggested that the problem might be that I was exporting into a directory that already had a file the same name as one of the files being exported. At first I considered that unlikely because I had created new directories specifically to export into.
However, when I thought back to what I had done during my tests I realized that a few times I had first accidently had a few files selected when I selected to export masters. Then when I realized my mistake I had selected all files and reexported to the same location.
I ran a quick test and indeed, if you export to a directory that already has files with the same name you get no warning and the strange naming results. Rather than using a name similar to the master file name it appears to increase the number in the filename which causes it to have the name as another master file being exported. This causes the results where several of the exported files have incorrect filenames and there are additional files.
So as long as you are careful to make sure that you don’t export to a directory that already has a file with the same name you should be able to avoid this particular bug.
I still haven’t had an opportunity to try out everything that Aperture offers but am feeling more comfortable about using Aperture as a major part of my photography work flow.