This is really neat. John Hoogstrate has created a PHP-based system for browsing, filtering, and viewing Aperture libraries with a web browser called PHPture. It's open source and available at Source Forge . It uses SQLite to access the Aperture database and makes use of the high-resolution previews feature of Aperture 1.5 to display the images. It only ever reads the database so should be completely safe. Installation is not trivial since it needs PHP 5.

The design is very Aperture-like as you can see from the screen shot. An obvious application for this is when you have a number of people who need to be able to browse a library. Share it on the network or your machine and point PHPture at it. Multiple copies of Aperture are not needed.

It *does* need a new name though.

Tags: Aperture, Web Tools, Library, Interesting Stuff