I think I just found a bug in Aperture and I'm wondering if you've come across it or have a workaround/solution. I'm trying to do a search by shutter speed. The speed I'm trying to isolate is 1/30 sec. The thing is, I try to use Aperture's EXIF search by creating a smart album and then using the "Smart Settings" of "Shutter Speed - is - 1/30" Ah -- so here we are at the bug: This field doesn't seem to offer support for fractions. Entering 1/30 will give me photos with a shutter speed of 1 sec. Any suggestions?

Aperture records the shutter speed as seconds and in floating point, so it is not interpreting the numbers you type as intended.

To filter on shutter speed, add a new line based on the EXIF data to a filter:

And then select Shutter Speed. If the shutter speed is a simple integral value like 1/100s, you can select is and type in the value, 0.01 in this case. Use a calculator to get the decimal value of the fraction. For trickier values such as 1/30s, it's best to use a range and bracket the exact value of 0.0333333 like so:

This kind of thing lends itself to saving as a smart album in order to save repeating all the typing. It would be nice if Aperture could recognize fractions correctly, or even have a pop-up of common shutter speeds available.

Tags: Q&A, Aperture, Filtering, Shutter Speed