Aperture, the first all-in-one post-production tool for photographers, provides everything you need to manage your photo library: flexible organizational tools, comprehensive metadata support, and powerful search tools that let you find files instantly.
Strong, flexible import tools
Aperture lets you import photos from a wide variety of sources and preserves the method you used to organize files when you drag folders from your hard drive and drop them into Aperture.
In fact, because Aperture supports both AppleScript and Automator, you can streamline many aspects of your workflow by automating those day-in day-out tasks you repeatedly find yourself doing.
With an Automator action, you can automatically place images you’re importing into a folder, add pre-defined metadata to them, and then back up the folder. That’s hands-free efficiency.
Fully customizable hierarchical structure
Aperture lets you organize a photo library with thousands of projects any way you want — in Projects, Albums, Folders, or any combination thereof.
Create multiple Albums of related images within a Project. Or nest folders inside a project to organize albums, books, websites, and light tables. You can even have Aperture automatically group images together into Smart Albums based on defined criteria. With Aperture, you can work on multiple projects at once and freely copy or move photos among folders, projects, and albums.
Deep Metadata Support
Aperture lets you view, extract, and add metadata with unprecedented ease. On import, it automatically extracts all industry-standard EXIF and IPTC metadata. What’s more, it lets you comprehensively add important metadata — copyright, captions, keywords — at the point of import. That’s a real time saver.
As you work with images, you’re never more than a keystroke away from seeing your metadata in, for example, the customizable Metadata Heads-Up Display, where you can customize the metadata to suit your needs. You can also choose what metadata Aperture displays with your images and what metadata to embed when you export images.
A Lock on keywords
When it comes to keywords, Aperture significantly outshines other applications. It not only supports true, hierarchical keywording but also provides a number of intuitive ways to assign keywords to images.
For example, Aperture comes with collections of associated Keyword Sets (and lets you create your own). Call up the Wedding Set, for example, and you’ll have a group of associated keywords — bride, table shots, wedding party, vows, candids, limo, cake cutting — any of which you can assign with a keystroke.
Using the Keyword Heads-Up Display, you can drag and drop keywords onto a single image or entire group of images at once. And, here’s a real time-saver, once you’ve assigned a variety of keywords to an image, Aperture lets you “lift” them from one image and “stamp” them onto other images. Assigning and working with keywords has never been simpler or more rewarding.
Find photos fast
The more photos you have, the more you need strong built-in search tools. Aperture obliges by providing a free-form search field you can use to find any photo instantly. You can use Aperture’s Query Heads-Up Display to perform fast, live filtering of any album, project, or folder. Even your entire Library. Or you can use it to create pinpoint searches based on several or dozens of criteria — then save them for later use.
Integrated Backup
And you’ll really appreciate how easy it is to safeguard your images and protect the time you’ve invested organizing, adjusting, and assiging keywords to them. With Aperture, backing up your photo library is fast and simple. In fact, Aperture backs up with just a single click.
Aperture provides this protection via its Vault. In its simplest form, a vault consists of a single external hard drive. Depending on the size and complexity of your Library, you may have multiple vaults and the vaults themselves could consist of multiple external drives.
If it sounds complicated, it isn’t. In fact, it’s so simple that you don’t even have to keep track of what needs to be backed up. Aperture keeps track for you, automatically changing the color of the Vaults to indicate their status: Red if it finds “master” images you haven’t backed up; Yellow, if it finds “versions” of those master images (complete with adjustments, metadata, and ratings) that require back up; Black, if your library is completely backed up.
In addition to taking the tedium out of the backup process, Aperture also speeds you through it, expediting the process by automatically backing up to multiple removable drives concurrently. That significantly reduces the time needed to back up your files and means you’ll spend less time backing up images and more time working with — and taking more of — them.
