The Fail Blog consists of pictures of things gone wrong and the word FAIL added. Some are set up, some are likely fake (as above), but most are real situations that just ooze failure of one sort of another.

Tags: Photography, Fun, Failure, Accidents, Bone-Headedness, Captions, Novices

Joe Schorr, Apple's Senior Product Manager of Photo Applications (wasn't he just product Manager for Aperture a while ago?) has spoken to the assembled throngs in a posting on the Aperture discussion board:

We're constantly working to make Aperture an even better tool for users, and will soon release an upgrade that includes RAW format support for new cameras and other exciting new features. Please stay tuned.

Joe Schorr
Sr. Product Manager, Photo Applications
Apple

My guess is that at the first possible moment following PMA opening its doors (ie Thursday morning), Apple is going to announce whatever it is we have all been waiting for. Then, I'm sure the real whining will begin as it dawns on people that Apple has somehow not implemented every single one of their personal favorite missing features.

[Update: Nothing so far (the end of Jan 31st). I saw this posting at DPReview:

The booth number reserved for Apple (X128) simply says HOLD. It doesn't even identify the company by name anymore. Perhaps they will be a no show.

Curiouser and curiouser.

Tags: Aperture, Updates, Anticipation

Juza has a very practical guide to macro and nature photography at Juza Nature Photography.

Tags: Photography, Macro, Bugs, DSLR

Ian Wood, a prolific poster on Apple's Aperture discussion forum (how does he get anything else done?) has posted a quick how to on sharing Aperture image adjustment presets.

Tags: Aperture, Tips And Tricks, Presets

Make Magazine has a link to and discussion about Claude Paillard who makes his own vacuum tubes. Not only that, he makes the machines, tools, and equipment he needs to make the vacuum tubes. The site has a link to a 17 minute video (125MB) that shows the whole process. It's fascinating to watch.

If you happen to live in Hong Kong, then Sheung Wan is the place to go. There are stores like WiWi Tubes with thousands of square feet of them. The site has some information on and pictures of the manufacture of tubes, for instance the 300B.

To find out what a vacuum tube actually does, check Wikipedia's entry and links.

Tags: Vacuum Tubes, Interesting Stuff

There has been a great deal of speculation as to what will be in the next release of Aperture -- even as to whether it will be called 2.0 or 1.6 -- but now there are rumors starting to appear. I saw this one on DPReview. It's a typical "I have a friend of a friend whos hair cutter knows this guy who overheard two people on a bus talking" kind of rumor. So there is no way to know how accurate it is. There are so many things that could be changed or improved, that practically any subset would be believable. You can even see how people were thinking a while back at MacPredict (the site appears to no longer be updated).

What does appear to be unanimous is that either Apple will announce something at PMA this week, or thousands will defect to Lightroom. Apart from some bug fixes, it has been an awfully long time since any significant changes were made: 1.5 was released September 29, 2006 according to Wikipedia.

Fraser Speirs posted his wishes for Aperture a short time ago. And Eric Barzeski made his wish-list known a year ago and is itching for information. Sören Nils Kuklau has a list that he posted last year. Inside Aperture speculated some time ago, around the same time that Ed Fladung had a go. Chuqui hoped for 2.0 before Christmas 2007, but was disappointed.

My needs are modest, so I'm wishing for things like better speed and better keyboard navigation. For the product, I think the best thing that could happen would be a flexible plug-in architecture so that the application could be expanded by third parties. I would also like to be able to have Aperture handle all media types, not just photos, and to have a lightweight application that can read the database independently. That would allow plugins and automation scripts run at the same time as Aperture, so not interrupting workflow.

We shall see. I hope it's not Leopard-only because I'm still on Tiger, waiting for a compatible update to SuperDuper.

Tags: Aperture, Updates, Wild Guesses, Photography, Anticipation

Missing from Aperture is the ability to attach notes and documents to images, albums, or projects. A partial way around this limitation is to create web journals in Aperture and associate them with the images they relate to.

To add notes to My Macworld 2008 project, I control-click the project and select New > Web Journal:

That creates an unnamed web journal inside the project which I then rename. A web journal consists of blocks of text and images arranged on individual pages, the idea being that each page is a single entry for a unit of time such as a day. In this case I'm just going to use one page.

I add text to the blank web journal by clicking the +T icon, or by dragging it to where I want a new entry. The green line shows where it will be placed:

Placeholder text appears and can be replaced with notes by overtyping:

There is a control at the top right that selects whether the text is used as a subtitle or as body text. I can also replace the site title and other placeholder text.

To add images to the web journal pages, I must first add them to the web journal image browser. I add images by option-clicking on a project or album so that two browsers are displayed together and then drag the images I want over to the web journal browser:

In this case I am taking images from the MacWorld 2008 project, but they could come from anywhere in my library.

To make things easier, I can lock the viewer to the web journal browser:

This keeps the web journal displayed all the time even if I select album or project browsers and click on the images they contain.

Once I have some images in the web journal browser, I add them to my notes as illustrations by just dragging them in:

As well as living inside projects, web journals can also be stored in blue folders or brown folders. Although I can't have web journals inside albums or smart albums, I can name my web journals in such a way that they are easily associated with them.

While this technique does not allow documents to be stored with projects, I can still associate them. Using a copy of TextWrangler, I open a new file browser with option command N. Then I navigate to the document I want, in this case a Garageband file, and control-click:

By selecting Copy URL I have a URL that starts with file://. I paste that into my web journal. Later when I want to access the document I can copy and paste the URL into Safari. Safari will open the document if it can (for a movie for instance), or if it cannot will reveal it in the Finder. This technique works with folders as well. There is, unfortunately, no way to make the link clickable.

Tags: Aperture, Web Journals, Workflow

Hardmac is reporting that 10.5.2 will bring RAW support for Nikon D300 and D3 cameras.

Tags: Nikon, Mac OS X, Updates, RAW, DSLR

Digital Photography School shows how to shoot light trails. Some good advice on exposure, location, and other technique.

Tags: Photography, Light Trails, Learning, DSLR

This thread on Apple's Aperture discussion forum includes a fix for a bug that prevents Automator actions from working correctly under Leopard. It manifests itself with the error:

-NSNull length: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0xa063f020

Berend posts this explanation and fix:

What has happened is that the Aperture Automator actions have been removed from /System/Library/Automator on installing Leopard (probably with Archive and Install).

I've been having this same issue and couldn't for the life of me figure out what was wrong.
The hint provided by the previous poster put me on the right track.

The Aperture Automator actions are located in the the Aperture application.

Steps to take for repairing the situation:

1. Open a Finder window and navigate to /System/Library/Automator
2. Open a second Finder window and navigate to /Applications/Aperture
3. Execute a Show package Contents of Aperture (you should get a third Finder window).
4. Now navigate to Contents/Library/Automator
5. Select everything (.definition and .action) in that folder
6. Copy with option drag to the folder in the window created in step 1.
You will be asked for the administrator password.
7. Close superfluous windows.
8. Start Automator and enjoy.

In short: copy the contents of /Applications/Aperture.app/Contents/Library/Automator to
/System/Library/Automator

I've done this and no longer get the NS Null error messages. I can now access the actions and will see if they actually work some time in the next few days.

Cause: Apple Leopard Installer.
Remedy: Apple should have warned beforehand that something like this would happen and should have provided the solution.

Hopefully the expected updated to Mac OS X and Aperture will fix this.

Tags: Aperture, Bugs, Leopard, Automation

A tree against the sky. By enhancing the colors in the original I was able to get some blue, yellow, and red into the image. It needs cropping.

1/3200s f/6.3 ISO400 50mm, Canon 30D, EF 50 f/1.8, adjusted

Dead tree in the form of a leaf. This leaf was blown by the high winds onto the wet window and stuck there. A dreary day, so this took some enhancement to look interesting.

1/250s f/2.8 ISO800 55mm -0.3ev, Canon 30D, EF 17-55 f/2.8 IS, adjusted

This is dead tree converted into card and printed with a puzzle laying on more dead tree. You can't tell from the pieces, but this puzzle featured about 20 birds.

1/30s f/4.0 ISO400 44mm, Canon 30D, EF 17-55 f/2.8 IS, adjusted

A tree shape on the ceiling of a restaurant.

1/50s f/6.3 ISO800 28mm -1ev, Canon 30D, EF 17-55 f/2.8 IS, adjusted

Tags: Photography, Color, Trees

If you want to see how a crop will look in the final image but still play with it, set your workspace up like this:

After starting the crop with the C key, adjustments of the crop rectangle in the viewer are accompanied by thumbnail regeneration in the browser. Once it looks right, press A to finish. The same trick works in full screen mode:

Just make sure that the thumbnails are set to be visible all the time by setting the viewer mode to On:

Tags: Tips And Tricks, Aperture, Cropping, Workflow, Workspace, Thumbnails

I visited Macworld today. My immediate impression was that It was more crowded and larger than last year. Notably there were many companies selling storage solutions: clearly back up and media storage is now becoming mainstream in the Mac world.


This is a plastic missile launcher powered and controlled by USB. I was lucky enough to get the missile streaking out of the frame while the shutter was open.


Ever wanted to type with one hand? The FrogPad lets you do that. In the foreground are two pads, one for left-handed people and one for right-handed people. The common letters are on the keys and to get the less common letters you chord with another key. There is also a symbol and a shift lock key. It takes a little getting used to, but I was able to type a simple message without too much trouble.

These are relaxation pods. I didn't ask what went on inside them.


One use for an old iMac case: turn it into a trash can.


I got my hands on a MacBook Air after waiting in line for a while. It's very thin, very light, and it's a Mac. There's not much else to say about it. Performance seemed fine for the small amount of playing that I did with it. The case got warm, but definitely not hot. Since it is all aluminum and curved, it's much stiffer than you would think it would be. MacBook Pros look like huge ugly bricks next to this thing.

Apple was showing off very little this year. The only Macs apart from the MacBook Airs were Mac Pros with two big screens each. These were being used to show off some pro apps and also for general OS X demonstration to any interested parties. No sign of Aperture. No iMacs. No minis. There was a whole wall of Apple TVs and plenty of iPods and iPhones on display.


Eye-Fi was there with their orange wireless SD card. You plug it into your camera and it transmits your JPEG images via regular wifi to your computer. Their software then stores it or automatically uploads it to a photo sharing site.


I also saw people creating hideous creatures with Spore. The gaming area was small this year.


Need a cover for your laptop? I didn't think so.

Tags: Macworld, Fun, Apple TV, Apple, Dinosaurs, Interesting Stuff, iPhone, iPod

Aperture's smart album filtering logic offers only the most basic logical choice: all the conditions set in the dialog or any of the conditions set in the dialog. This means that while there are many different criteria provided, it not apparently possible to combine them in complex ways.

However, due to the fact that there are actually two levels of filtering provided by the thumbnail and grid views, impossible filters can be constructed. For instance, I can find images taken on Wednesday OR Thursday OR Friday AND at between 100 and 130mm focal length. I can find images with the keyword Duck OR Swan OR Goose AND the keyword Lake AND rated two stars and above. And if I want, I can make these type of smart filters specific to a single project or to a collection of projects in a blue folder.

Here is how to combine logic using the two available levels. I'll use the requirement that I need to view all RAW images taken in 2007. To find all RAW images I have to create a filter that ORs together all the different kinds of RAW there can be, since there is no setting for "is RAW".

First I select the library and create a new smart album and call it RAW-2007:

I select the Library before I create the smart album because I want this to work on all my images. The dialog reflects this in its title.

Then I set the match to be ANY and filter to Filename ends with .CR2. I add some more conditions for the file name ending that deal with all the RAW formats I am going encounter:

I could check the Ignore stack groupings box at the bottom if I wanted to look inside stacks. This first filter finds all the RAW images in my library.

I close the dialog and with the smart album still selected I click on the filter icon on the browser, top right.

To set up the second level of filtering I filter on the EXIF capture year and match it to 2007:

I could add more conditions at this point, such as ratings or camera model, if I wished.

To make more filters similar to this one, say for different years, I duplicate the smart album, rename it, and then change the year number in the filter:

This second level of filtering works because each album, project, and smart album remembers its current filter setting. I have to be careful not to change it once I have the thumbnails displayed or else it will not work as expected when I reinvoke it. One way to reduce this risk is to select all the RAW-2007 images and create a new regular album from them (or just use the New Album With Current Images button) Since no more images will be added in 2007, the contents of that static album should never change.

Tags: Aperture, Filtering, Metadata, Smart Albums, RAW, Library

I bet the fact that the MacBook Air (MBA) is aimed at holders of a Master's degree of Business Administration (MBA) was not altogether unintentional.

Tags: MacBook Air

The MacBook Air is a dramatic departure for Apple: it's a narrowly-targeted hardware product. The geeks on the forums hate it because their rumor-fuelled dreams have been dashed and they will have to keep lugging their 12" PowerBooks around for a few more years. But then the geeks are not the target market for this product and they don't seem to understand that large, profitable markets for highly cost-controlled products exist outside of their domain.

Apple has plenty of narrowly-targeted software products (Final Cut Pro for instance) and these don't attract the same howls of derision. But then those products target markets by adding specialized features and charging appropriately. Taking features away, as Apple did with iMovie in iLife08, is bound to cause geek grief because the expectation exists that the monotonic march toward "better" is always along the "more" axis. Not so. So who will be buying the world's thinnest laptop?

A simple answer: anyone who values it highly enough.

That will include executives and sales people who travel, present, and are seen with their laptop in important business situations. They value low weight and looks above everything else. They already have a Mac at home, including maybe a MacBook of some sort, but they will still buy a MacBook Air because it gives them the things they cannot get otherwise. This is the Miata of the laptop world: a second or third purchase after the most critical needs have been fulfilled, only for those who have the juice to make what they want real.

MacBook Air is clearly a companion computer. Apple has stripped everything from it that is not necessary in order to save weight and space. What is left is an interesting set: wireless Ethernet, audio out, video out, and USB 2.0. Those cover what must be the four most numerous connections on the planet right now. And once you pair it with a companion Mac, you have everything you need for anything.

The breathtaking omission for many is that the battery is built-in. But why are batteries removable in the first place? Removable batteries represent a huge additional cost in every aspect of Apple's business: more design, more material, more safety concerns, more stock, more line items, more connectors, more testing; the list goes on and on. The overall product design gains enormously by building the battery in, as Apple has shown with the iPod and, more recently, the iPhone.

To me, the inclusion of a back-lit full-size keyboard cements the target market as that of highly mobile, highly responsible, highly visible individuals whose time and presence carries a high price. We'll be seeing lots of these in the real world, many of them in dim lighting and accompanied by the whirr of a projector fan.

Tags: MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, Apple, Macworld, Drama, Lust

The big surprise at Macworld last year was that the keynote was pretty much about about one product: the iPhone. This year there seem to be many things that are already known: a slim laptop, an update to the iPhone, a new Apple TV and movie rentals. So none of these is probably the big thing. And the banners saying "There's something in the air" have everyone talking about wireless technologies.

[Update: Less then 100% wrong this year. Home storage yes, but not attached. In fact very unattached: Time Capsule. Apple is moving the world slowly to computer appliances. We did get the rambling CEO again]

Last year my predictions were 100% wrong. Throwing caution to the wind, I present my probably all wrong predictions for Macworld 2008:

A Home Storage System
I keep putting this one up, and one day I will be right. Nobody does home storage right, particularly for Mac users, so there is a big market opportunity there. I think it will not be a networked box (NAS), but instead will be locally attached for performance. If you want to make the storage available on the network, plug it into an Airport or a Mac. Software does the bridging.

Wireless Data Service In Every Laptop
WiMax is a little new to the market, so if Apple has built it into anything, they have been doing an awful lot of work with chip vendors and software in secret. It's quite possible that Apple is putting WiMax into everything portable, but more likely is the addition of 3G or EDGE into the laptops.

No Shows
This is not the venue for for a new release of Aperture. PMA is much more likely. There will also be no new iLife of iWork: we already got those last year. The no-show I am hoping for is the "other CEO" who comes in at about minute 35 and rambles with notes until the audience winces. I really think that Steve puts these in so we can deal with the calls of nature.

A New Mac
I think a new desktop Mac is quite likely. Something that fits between the high-end of the Mac Pro and the low end of the iMac. It would be bigger than a mini, with at least two hard drive bays and at least one open slot for a PCI card. This would keep many people happy who need some expansion and flexibility but don't have the wallet for a full-blown Mac Pro. What makes it possible now is the low-power Intel chips and the subsequent option to package the electronics compactly.

Multi-User Mac Software
This is a long shot, but I think it will come one day. The Macs are already multi-user, but not with with multiple simultaneous screens. This software will allow a number of people to plug mice, keyboards, and screens into one mac and all use that one machine as though it were their own machine. That makes things much cheaper for schools and other high-density applications.

A Recording Device
Except for building it into Macs, Apple has avoided making audio and video recording equipment of any kind. Even the iPhone and iPod can't record video or sound. So there is a product gap for some sort of device that does one or both. You sync it with your Mac or PC just like an iPod and iTunes tracks it in its library. What Apple can better the market with are ease of use, recording quality, and capacity. With iTunes, Garageband, iMovie, YouTube, all the infrastructure is in place for personal event recording, editing, and publishing. We just need the gadget.

Tags: Apple, Macworld, Wild Guesses, Server, Fun, MacPro, Wireless, iPhone, iMac, iMovie

There is a Wikipedia for cameras: Camerapedia. One of the things they list is my first SLR: the Olympus OM-30. The on-off switch is on the right in this image: protruding part on the ring around the film rewind knob. This meant that it was really easy to turn the camera on as you were putting it back into its case, and so completely run down the five very expensive button cells that it needed to operate.

Tags: Photography, Canon, Nikon, DSLR, History, Museum, Interesting Stuff, Olympus

Brett Gross recounts his experience tackling the message from Aperture: An inconsistency in your database has been detected.

He did all the right things. He immediately made a back up of the library. Then he tried repairing the problem. When that didn't work, he broke the problem down and solved one part at a time. After he had some success, he made another back up in addition to the first. Eventually he found what was causing the problem, deleting the offending files, and all was well.

Tags: Aperture, Library, Database, Backing Up

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories have perfected edible googly eyes, so enabling them to create a 100% edible Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Tags: Flying Spaghetti Monster, Food, Fun, Creatures

My style of photography seems to prefers a dominant color in the frame. I'm catching up with photos taken in the last month.


Caustic Drips: 1/1000s f/5.0 ISO400 200mm -0.3ev, Canon 30D, Canon EF 70-200 f2.8L IS, adjusted, cropped

These are drips on a gutter two stories up. I like how the metal crystals are visible and the light forms spikes as it passes through the water. If you turn it upside down it's almost impossible to figure out what it is because so little in the image is recognizable and the shading is unexpected.


Sunlit Gulls: 1/2500s f/5.0 ISO400 200mm -0.3ev, Canon 30D, Canon EF 70-200 f2.8L IS, adjusted

I adjusted this image of gulls flying overhead to keep the detail on the wing and other brightly-lit areas but did not attempt to brighten the rest of the image. That draws the eye to the bright parts and provides something to look at when it gets there.


Twisted Cloud: 1/125s f/3.5 ISO100 173mm, Canon 30D, Canon EF 70-200 f2.8L IS, unadjusted

I'm not sure what cause the odd twisted cloud to form, but its shadow was projected onto the underside of the cloud by the setting sun. The colors were very vivid and required no adjustment. The 30D had no problem focusing on the clouds, but I found later that the clouds were actually out of focus and the tree was in focus.

Tags: Photography, Color, Sunset, Drips, Birds

What is missing is a search field at the top of the library pane that filters on the name of projects and folders. Aperture works best with relatively small projects and provides blue folders for grouping them. But as time goes on, the number of projects and folders increases to the hundreds, and the point is reached where it is impossible to remember where anything is; hence the need to be able to filter.

Another missing feature is the ability to tag projects. Aperture is hot on keywords and has all these features based on metadata, but still offers only a hierarchical organization for projects. If I could tag projects then I could classify them in several different ways simultaneously. For instance, I could have some projects tagged Personal and Biking and others tagged Business and Biking and be able to filter to any Biking projects, not caring about the situation in which I shot them.

In the Finder list view I can open and close all folders at once with command right arrow and command left arrow respectively. I can include nested folders if I add the option key. But there is no similar facility in Aperture's library pane. In looking for a project I have to manually open, open, open, all the folders, and then when I'm done, close, close, close, all the folders. This adds to the frustration in dealing with many folders and projects.

Tags: Aperture, Library, Folders, Projects

I have a question about moving/relocating vaults. I looked around your site, but haven't been able to find anything. I ran out of space on my external, where I store my vault just before xmas. So yesterday I bought a new external. It's only storing items I've put in my library since my last update on the old vault. I want to know how can I create a fresh new vault and store EVERYTHING in it on my new external? Do I need to remove my old vault from aperture? I appreciate any help.

There are two ways to move a vault: move it yourself and tell Aperture where it has moved to, or abandon the old vault and create a new one on the new drive. The former is more useful if you have moved a Firewire disk from one server to another and have not had to copy anything; the latter if you are moving to a new drive and have to copy the data anyway.

Here is an example of moving a vault. Here is my current vault:

I want to move it to a different volume. First I notice that it is not synced, so I click on the arrows button to do a sync:

And then I copy the vault to its new destination by using the Finder.

I have make the current vault go offline before Aperture will allow me to give a new location for it. If it were on an external drive I could do this easily: just unmount the drive and Aperture would note that. In my case it's on my internal hard drive, so I must move or rename it. I can't make any changes to it straight away because it is locked:

I unlock the file in the Finder by deselecting the Locked checkbox in the Finder's Get Info window (command I):

Now I move the file to a different place on my hard drive so that Aperture will not find it, then quit and relaunch Aperture. Now Aperture sees it as disconnected:

I am ready to tell Aperture where the vault has moved to. I select the vault in Aperture's vault pane, and from the cog menu bottom right I select Update Vault Path...

I navigate to the new location to tell Aperture where it is and can now use the vault as normal.

To delete the old vault, since the lock was removed, I just drag it to the trash and empty the trash. If I had moved to another hard drive then I would format the old drive immediately to make sure that it was impossible to get the vault on it confused with my new one.

Tags: Aperture, Q&A, Vaults, Moving

Fraser Speirs (of FlickrExport fame) shares his Aperture workflow:

Someone asked me recently about how I work through my photographs after I shoot. When I go out to photograph, I shoot a lot - most people I go out with are usually surprised at the number of frames I produce. It’s not uncommon for me to take the kids to the park and come home with 150-300 images.I find that I can usually edit down 350 images to around 50 in 40-60 minutes and I thought I would share how I go about this.

He also has a more recent blog entry entitled When I Delete a Photo (almost never, basically). I have a different philosophy: I reject many photos and delete all the rejects about once a month.

Tags: Aperture, Workflow, Deleting, Renaming, Referenced

Übermind has added another Aperture plug-in to its line-up: ÜberUpload. It's an FTP uploader with a host of added features:

• FTP and SFTP support
• Bonjour support for auto-detecting servers on the network
• Safari-like organizable Favorites
• Finder-style browsing of remote servers with Column and Outline views
• Narrow down a list of files on remote servers with Spotlight-like search
• Permissions on uploaded images and new folders simplified
• Zip your images, individually or as one, on upload

Tags: Aperture, Plug-ins, FTP, Exporting

A knowledgebase article in Apple's support area states that under Leopard, using Software Update to update Aperture to 1.5.6 may fail to install. The fix is to download the update and install it manually. You can see all Aperture articles by searching for "kf8" or using this URL.

I almost never use Software Update to install updates. I use it to tell me what I need and then go and download and install the software manually. That also saves me from downloading multiple times to update all the machines in the house.

Tags: Apple, Aperture, Updates, Leopard

It's 2008 and I have imported Jan 1 photos but there is no 2008 blue folder under library like my previous years. These are not regular blue folders rather a double rectangle in blue with an asterisk in the bottem right corner. How is this created? Thanks. Great site!

Those are built-in smart albums and there is nothing you can do about them:

I never use them. If you find where they are defined and change them, then Aperture will put them back to their defaults. But you would think that 2008 would have been automatically created since it follows 2007. Every time, so far at least.

The fix is to make regular smart albums for years. I click on Library and create a new smart album like this:

By selecting the library first, the scope of this smart filter is the entire library. Renaming the new smart album and clicking on the magnifying glass gives me the filter dialog. Notice that the title says (Library), showing the scope. I could use the + pop-up top right to add a Date line to the filter and then set a range of dates:

But this is messy. Once the dates are entered they change to include the time and time zone. When I set up one for 2007 the filter did not find images I had shot during the last 8 hours of 2007. I am 8 hours behind UTC, so I assume that this filter works on UTC. Handy for those who require the same universal time comparison worldwide so that everyone agrees on when 2008 starts and ends, but not what I need.

So I go for the quick fix by selecting select EXIF from the + button top right and matching the Capture Year:

In both cases I select Ignore stack groupings in order to allow images inside stacks to be included.

Tags: Aperture, Q&A, Smart Albums, Library, Workflow, EXIF

Here we are at the start of 2008 and AAPL has a price of $198.08 per share. About a year ago when it was 91.66, I predicted that it would hit 160 by the end of 2007. To my surprise, it got there several months early (October), and has continued to rise.

In October 2007 I made another prediction: $225 by the end of 2008. That seemed pretty wild at the time, but soon after all the analysts moved their targets up and now they are mostly saying $225-$250 for the end of 2008. Some are toying with $300, and one has even said $600 in 18 months.

Just to confuse everyone Apple is notoriously conservative with their estimates, and so the analysts beef it up a little (and still come up short). Last quarter Apple was uncharacteristically bullish and everyone was surprised. But it seems that Apple was being conservative yet again, as all the indications are that this has been a blow-out season and the numbers will be very good again.

I got to $225 by taking $160 and adding 20% for growth and 20% for the "look out here they come" factor. Now the price is just shy of $200, I'm going to adjust my guess again. I'm increasing my annual growth estimate to 30% based on expectations for the Mac and iPhone, and adding 25% as the "look out here they come" factor. The latter is a wild guess based partly what I see in terms of realization that Apple really is taking over, and partly on the effect on the investing public of the products and stores. People go into the stores or buy the products for the first time and are so wowed that they (or their parents) go buy stock ASAP. For a high-flying stock AAPL has a remarkably small short ratio.

That puts my current wild guess at $310 for the end of 2008. It will be interesting to see what the quarter's results are like when they are announced January 22nd.

Tags: Apple, Wild Guesses, iPhone