Wish List from Aperture

[BobShaw]

Hi,
I am migrating my workflow from Aperture to Photos + Raw Power and have just successfully done my first customer export with difficulty.
So I am hoping to find better ways. I have read the 3.1 manual but it is fairly light and doesn’t appear much different to the the 3.0 manual (and we are now at version 3.4.7)

In particular Page 8 describes Smart Albums, but they aren’t on my Photos Browser and from other reading they aren’t supported from Photos. Can you make new ones in Raw Power?
My wish list at the moment for the Photos Library browser is –

1. A keyboard short cut for Crop like “C” in Aperture.
2. A faster way to change a crop. At the moment it is slow and you need to confirm each change with Photos, then for the next image Select Crop again. In Aperture you just press Return and arrow to the next image. (This is for centring of images in the crop so each image is different. You can’t just Batch them.)
3. Can it read the Keywords from Photos. (This would be very useful if you could do Smart Albums.)
4. If I edit the Original file in JPG Photoshop it does not update the Preview in Raw Power (or Photos for that matter) I had to do a fake edit and save and then it updated.
5. Can you make a duplicate version of the same original file? This is necessary because I have different websites that the photo needs to be exported to, one landscape and one portrait.

Bob

[Nik Bhatt]

You’re right, the manual is out of date. As an independent (sole) developer, my time is pulled in many directions. The manual hasn’t been a priority. I have made videos for some of the newer features on YouTube (look for the Gentlemen Coders channel) (e.g., lens correction and fringe removal, etc.). That might be worth your time.

The term “smart albums” is a poorly-defined one unfortunately – Photos uses that term for a variety of albums, both system-generated and user-generated. System generated albums include media types (e.g., panoramas) as well as the RAW album. Those are accessible to apps. Photos does not provide user-generated albums to 3rd party apps, so there isn’t a way to display them.

As far as your wish list:
1. keyboard shortcut for crop – yes, that is something I’ve wanted to do for a while.

2. changing the crop – crop in general has a number of issues that need to be addressed. I agree that having to confirm with Photos every time is annoying. However, there isn’t a way to approve changes only once. Apple requires it for every image. It would be possible to add a “batch” feature where you approve a group of edited images at once, but that’s the best that can be done.

3. No, the app is not provided access to keywords or titles/descriptions from Photos. I have made formal requests to Apple and spoken to people there. So far, no luck. I have provided them some suggestions – we will have to see.

4. Photos does not support the idea of modifying the original externally (or internally for that matter) – it’s non destructive. You would need to use the external editing feature of Photos.

5. It’s possible for the app to make a duplicate, but the Photos library doesn’t have specific support for that. The app would need to download everything and then create a new image. That’s doable, except that because Photos doesn’t expose keywords or titles, the duplicate would not contain the keywords or titles. Because of that I have not implemented that feature. You would need to use Photos for that.

[BobShaw]

Thanks for the prompt response Nik.

In regard to point 4, what I do with a shoot of several hundred images for a customer is import full size JPG into Photos, do some minor format changes and export the proofs to the customer to select the required images. Once he has made the selections I then edit the selected JPG images in Photoshop, generally to clean the background and clone out unwanted objects.

When I go back to Photos or Raw Power the image has not changed. If the preview is referenced to the original file (which has changed), why does it not see the changes? In Aperture it just started “Processing” and popped up new after a period of time.

I was able to force it to change though by making a very slight edit and saving.

Bob

[Nik Bhatt]

If you use the Edit With feature of Photos to open the JPEG in Photoshop, it should work properly. How are you sending the image to Photoshop?

[BobShaw]

Hi Nik,
I use actions in Photoshop to replace the background, basically Select Subject and then Replace Unselected with 230,230,230 or whatever the customer specifies.
So once I have selected the images to go to the customer I put the original JPG files in a folder and use the Batch process in Photoshop to do them all at once, then put them back in the original folder.

Then I go back to the catalogue (Aperture, Photos, Raw Power) and hope to see them ready to go.
Aperture detects the original has changed and starts processing by itself and they come up as you scroll through them. Photos and Raw power don’t seem to detect the change.
The work around at the moment is to create a Preset that changes to the Clarity from 0 to 0.1 and then they all re-render.

I think to use an external edit process on each would be too slow and just create an unwanted extra file.
Bob

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