By gluing together exiftool, Applescript, Perl, and Aperture Allan Hise and Brett Gross have created a solution to the problem of missing EXIF data in Aperture by adding it automatically as part of the import.

I have this problem myself: the Canon S3 does not put useful ISO data in a standard place and so I have no ISO data for my images. Other people want to import GPS data, lens data, and other information that sits uselessly in their images, unavailable to Aperture.

To add data to images already in Aperture he has this tool.

If you import keywords from a text file be aware of a couple of things.

1. The file must have a .txt extension, or Aperture will not let you open it. Easy to fix.

2. Make sure that the text file has Unix line endings (line feeds -- hex 0A). Not quite so easy to fix.

DOS line endings (line feed, carriage return -- hex 0D 0A) will seem to work, but will actually create keywords with carriage returns on the end and confuse you like crazy later on.

MacOS 9 line endings (carriage return -- hex 0D) will import only the first word in the file. But repeated imports of the same list will keep adding more and more copies of the same first keyword to the HUD.

You can easily check and clean your file if you suspect a problem. Get a copy of TextWrangler and open the file containing the keywords. Click on the document icon at the top of the window:

And if Unix is not selected, select it and save the file. That's it. You can also use TextWrangler to view invisible characters, indent whole blocks of text, clean up bad characters, and dump the file in hex.

If I put a keyword in the wrong place in the keyword hierarchy, then I can just drag it to where it should be. If I want the keyword to be at the top level, then I just drag it past the end of the list and drop it there. So far so good.

Here I have a keyword Oops that should not be under Animals. I want it at the top level, so I just drag it.

But I can't do that if I want it at the top level and the HUD is full of keywords because there is no end of list to drag it past.

To solve this problem, I type the keyword (or a part of it) into the search box to shorten the list. Now I can drag the keyword past the end of the list and get it to the top level again. Here is the same list in a much smaller HUD, but it is filtered by the search word and the move works:

Clicking the little X on the right of the search box gets the complete list back.

I've been using Aperture to adjust some images. Adjustments are slow on my machine (iMac G5), but usable. I'm using JPEGs as the original, so I have a limited amount of dynamic range.

When I first tried Lift and Stamp it seemed almost impossible to use. Once you click on Lift and the HUD comes up, the cursor changes to stamp. But it is not possible to select images to stamp because the cursor is not the selection cursor. And you want to select the images to stamp because you want to see the effect. While image selection is possible via the arrow keys, this is not very practical.

Then I found that the Command key changes the cursor to the select cursor and you can select images. Option changes the cursor from Lift to Stamp or vice versa. Once you know this it is quite efficient to apply changes to one image and then make similar adjustments to others. In particular you can use the Apply Stamp To Selected Images button.

I am also experiencing a problem whereby the displayed numerical pixel value changes to ... for R, G, B, and L. It only occurs on adjusted images.