Aperture 3 — Places And iPhone GPS
I’ve never really paid much attention to geo-tagging my photos, mostly because I didn’t have an easy way to do so. One of Aperture 3’s new features—one that was a very pleasant surprise—is the way that it can pull in GPS data from existing iPhone photos. It’s really brilliant in its simplicity.
I would guess that a very high percentage of Aperture users are also iPhone owners. This means that all you need to do is snap a single iPhone photo at your shooting location, and you can then use the GPS data from that photo to tag other SLR photos from the same location in Aperture. You don’t even need to import the photos from your phone into Aperture. You simply pull up a mini-browser that shows you the images on your iPhone (which has to be connected at the time). From there you select the image, creating a spot on the map. You can then assign as many other photos in your Aperture library as you’d like to this spot.
I’ve been hoping for years that to find an iPhone app that takes your location from the iPhone’s GPS, saves it, and then allows you to sync it back to your photos. (There may actually be something like this now.) This is much better. Viewing the photos on the iPhone’s camera roll is a quick and easy way to find the exact location, visually, that you are looking for.
I recently visited Los Angeles, and we went for a hike to the Griffith Observatory. I took a bunch of photos with my SLR on the way up, and from the observatory at the top. I also took a few along the way with my iPhone, but that’s all I needed. With those few iPhone photos, Aperture can pull the GPS info, and I can tag all the rest in a few clicks. Simple.
Ultimately, most of my favorite photos get sent to Flickr. As a bonus to all of this, when using Fraser Speirs’ excellent Flickr Export for Aperture uploading tool, all the GPS data is passed along from Aperture on export, and automatically added to Flickr.
In typical Apple fashion, Aperture 3 now takes something that I was interested in, but hesitant to jump into because there wasn’t a simple path to entry, and makes it even more user friendly than I could have imagined. It’s also interesting to watch how Apple has taken what is arguably the most consumer-friendly device ever, and leveraged its ubiquity to make an impact on one of their Pro apps. Geo-location data is something that I’ll always be happy to have connected to my photos, and now with this update, I don’t imagine ever not including it.
iPhones and iPhoto and Aperture—Oh My!
I haven’t been happy with using Aperture and iPhoto simultaneously for a long time. I’ve wanted to get all my needed photos into one app to make everything (iPhone/Apple TV syncing) more simple, but never really got around to it. It was one of those “I’ll get to it at some point”-type projects.
Fast forward to iPhone 3.0 software. All of the sudden my backups were taking much longer than they used to. Not the eight-hour horror stories I’ve heard some people talk about, but probably 5x as long as they had previously. I poked around a bit to see what people were saying about this. Some pointed to specific apps that may be the problem; some recommended deleting and re-installing all 3rd party apps. Somewhere else I saw a reference to backups in 3.0 handling photos on the iPhone’s camera roll differently than it did before (I’m not even sure if this is actually true; actually the more I think about it it doesn’t seem true—but it got me thinking). It suggested syncing all photos from the camera roll to iPhoto or Aperture (or whatever), deleting all photos from the camera roll, and then re-syncing from the album in iPhoto or Aperture.
Up until then I had been doing all of my photo work in Aperture, but syncing the iPhone to iPhoto. I had a few old albums of wedding and family photos I would sync to the phone from iPhoto, and I would sync all the camera roll photos there as well. Since I started using Aperture full time a few years ago the only new photos that were ever added to iPhoto were from the iPhone.
I also chose to never delete the photos from the camera roll on the phone after import, so I had somewhere in the 1,300+ picture/screenshot range on the camera roll. (Side note: with most process related things in this area I usually have a general idea how people handle things, but I realize that I really don’t with this. Is it unusual to keep all your photos on the camera roll? Is it common? How do people sync them? I’m curious to hear).
Anyway, I’d been meaning to migrate everything to Aperture for a while like I said (for the Vault especially), so I decided to sync the phone with Aperture, create a new project just for iPhone photos and try to move to this new system.
Everything seemed good initially, but I quickly noticed a few problems. The first was that iPhoto seemed to sync all photos automatically by date, and maintain this structure when synced with the phone. When I sorted all the photos in Aperture, they would show up by date within the app, but when they synced with the phone they would be sorted by filename. Almost all of the photos are in sequential order, but there are a few batches that are not, and they would throw everything off when it synced. Not having the iPhone photos sorted by date on the phone was almost useless, as that’s really the only means you have of finding anything. Still, I figured I could fix this by doing some bulk re-names sorted by date and file name, and eventually be okay.
The second problem I noticed was a bigger concern: all the screenshots (.PNGs) I had taken were now blurry when I viewed them on the phone and in Aperture—which had never happened when syncing with iPhoto. iPhone screenshots are important to me (I used them for app reviews, and a bunch of other stuff), so this was an issue. I figured (and it was suggested to me via Twitter) that it likely had something to do with how Aperture was handling the image previews (as well as the fact that iTunes does its own optimization when it syncs to the phone). I forced Aperture to re-create the previews and they were much better (though still not great). I then deleted them all from the phone and re-synced to see if this fixed it. It did not. They were still just as blurry when viewed on the phone. Back I went to taking a closer look at preview settings (as some friends suggested on Twitter).
I have Aperture set to limit my previews to half size, and keep the quality at 8 of 12. Working primarily with large RAW files the library size can get out of hand quickly if the previews are set too high. So I started looking around for solutions. Permanently changing the preview settings was not an option. I realized that I could change the preview preferences, force new previews on just the iPhone photos and that would probably do it. But then I’d need to go and change the settings back. And then repeat the process the next time, etc., etc. This was quickly becoming a path I didn’t want to go down.
So what did I do? I re-organized all the imported photos and screenshots in iPhoto and synced them back to the phone. At least now I had a freshly cleared camera roll, and the photos would be organized and displayed properly.
And remember how I started this whole song and dance because I thought it might help my backup times? Yeah, it didn’t. Not at all.
However, there was a pretty big silver lining to this whole excercise. At one point when I was finally moving everything back to iPhoto I started thinking about the 3GS and video. I’m on a 3G now, so video is not a concern. Still, I know eventually I’ll make my way over to a 3GS and when I do, I’ll need to deal with video on the camera roll as well as photos. Since iPhoto can handle imported video alongside photos, and Aperture can’t, at the end of the day I’ll be better keeping everything that comes off of the iPhone in iPhoto moving forward.
Just like it was to in the first place.
