The Gallery of Sawn In Half Cameras also includes lenses. Now I know why my 70-200 f/2.8L IS is no darn heavy.

Tags: Photography, Hacking, Lenses

File Juicer is a small Mac OS X application that extracts images, movies, text, and other useful data from practically anything. It's useful to Aperture users in two important ways: it can recover usable images from the library if the masters are lost and and can scrounge deleted images from memory cards.

One of the hazards of working with referenced image masters is that their management is the responsibility of the owner. Accidental deletions are not that uncommon, and if that happens then while Aperture can display the images, it cannot export or otherwise use any of the versions that are based on the lost masters. If the masters are truly lost -- no back ups, nothing in the trash -- then whatever images can be found become valuable.

If high resolution previews were generated, then these can be extracted from the Aperture library by simply selecting the thumbnail images in the browser and dragging them to the desktop. They will be in JPEG format and at a size and resolution that depends on the settings in Aperture's preferences:

If there are no previews, then attention turns to the thumbnail files that Aperture stores in each project. It is these images that are used to display the on-screen thumbnails in the browser pane and as placeholder images in the viewer while Aperture processes the RAW image. The files that contain the thumbnails are called AP.Tinies, AP.Minis, and AP.Thumbnails and contain images at 32, 256, and 1024 pixel sizes respectively. They are also present in exported projects, but not in vaults.

To get to the thumbnails, I control-click on the library and select Show Package Contents. Then I navigate down to the project of interest and open that with a control-click and Show Package Contents:

The AP.Thumbnails file is one big chunk of binary data, but inside there are complete JPEG images. File Juicer will go into it and locate and extract the JPEGs without knowing the format of the file.

I launch File Juicer and check that the preferences are set to include JPEG images (at least):

I also make sure that the extracted files will be stored somewhere sensible, such as on the desktop, because I don't want the extracted images put inside my Aperture library:

With the selections I have made, File Juicer will put each image type into a separate folder and create a parent folder for those. It will also get an HTML index file for easy browsing. To start scanning for images, I drop the AP.Thumbnails file from my project onto the main File Juicer window and wait for it to process:

After processing I get a new folder on my desktop containing the images:

And I can either open the jpg folder and browse the image icons in the Finder (or watch a slide show), or click on the index.html icon and see all the images in a browser window as a panoramic display:

Now my images have been extracted, I can reimport them into Aperture and sort through them. They will be smaller then the originals -- only up to 1024 pixels on a side-- and there will be one image per version. So a single lost master will result in five recovered JPEGs if it had five versions in that project. This is good because I get my adjusted images, albeit at low resolution.

Since File Juicer is scavenging for JPEGs rather than following any information that Aperture provides, there are some side-effects. The first is that there may be old images or possibly corrupted images in the folder of JPEGs. The second is that the names of the images are sequential and bear no relationship to the order in which they were taken or anything else. The third is that there is no EXIF or other metadata in the JPEGs, so all the keywords, camera and shooting data are lost.

File Juicer will also recover RAW and other images that have been deleted from camera cards, so if masters have been lost it is possible that they can be obtained that way. The process is very similar to the thumbnail recovery described here, except that there is an extra step at the beginning where File Juicer creates a disk image of the card and scans that.

The File Juicer web site has a page dedicated to its use with Aperture, and one about RAW image formats.

Tags: Aperture, Recover, Masters, Referenced, Deleting, Bone-Headedness, Hacking, Previews

Great site of Aperture how-to's and tips. A question for you. In a book, special occasion template, how does one change the color of all those colored boxes? What are those boxes, If I drag one from one page to another the color seems to vanish, though the selection handles are still there.

Here is an example of the colored boxes in that theme:

The colored boxes in the Special Occasion book are defined in the Aperture application itself. They are part of the theme, and so unless you hack into the theme by opening up the Aperture application bundle and edit plists, you cannot change them. You can, however get rid of them and add your own without any hacking.

If you do want to hack, then open the Aperture application with a control click and select Show Package Contents. Navigate to the folder Contents > Resources > Book Themes > Special Occasion > Hardcover > Graphics and you will see that it holds the files that define the blue rectangle and other things:

The BlueRect plist file contains just this, as shown by the plist editor:

and can be easily modified. However any modification will be lost if you update Aperture, so this is not advised.

To replace the blue rectangles with your own creation, you will need a colored graphic. Just a plain color square made in PhotoShop or some other utility will work fine. Perhaps you have some already available.

Here is is how I do it with ImageWell. I launch ImageWell and click Edit and delete anything that is there by selecting it and pressing delete:

I click on the rounded rectangle top left and drag the rectangle onto the editing area:

And change the size using the numbers bottom left to something that is big enough for print, say 3000 x 3000 pixels. I click the small rectangle on the right just below the yellow rectangle in the image above:

This opens the color picker and lets me pick a nice color. I don't have to be particularly fussy with my choice as you will see. I also set the border width to zero by editing the number bottom right:

I click the ImageWell icon top left to go back to the main window and give the image a name. Then I click and drag the image to the desktop.

Now I have my green image I import it into Aperture (just dragging onto a project works) and then drag the Aperture thumbnail to my book album. Here it is:

In my book I change to editing the layout:

and click on the blue rectangle I want to change. A right-click and a Cut removes it:

To put in the color I want, I create a new photo box and drag in my color image:

And there it is in the book:

If I don't like it, I can always change it. I just click on the thumbnail image and adjust the color and lightness using the controls in the HUD:

Adjusting the thumbnail will affect all the boxes that show that same color image, so I can adjust the look of the whole book with just a few HUD sliders. I can work with multiple versions of the same starting image and adjust each of them independently to vary the color scheme in many ways. This same method can be used to set background colors and patterns as well, of course.

Tags: Aperture, Color, Boxes, Books, Q&A, Hacking, Templates, Themes, Backgrounds

The folks over at Something Awful are hacking Apple TV. Since the ATV runs Mac OS X, this is almost trivial: pop the cover, take out the hard drive, mount it on a Mac via a Firewire case, and modify. They have it playing Xvid movies, running SSH, and more. The hard drive can be replaced with a larger one too.

I notice that it contains a ForceFeedback framework too. That means games. Only games (simulators) use force feedback.

It may seem odd that the box is as open as this. After all, the XBox and other equipment like it is locked down just as tight as the manufacturers can make it. Not that it stops anyone. But it is not odd at all when you consider that Apple is in the hardware business. An open box sells more boxes, and that is all that matters. This is really the lowest-cost Mac on the market now.

Tags: Apple, Apple TV, Hacking, Video Games, Interesting Stuff

     
Victor Maldonado describes how to use Final Cut Pro filters with Aperture.

Tags: Aperture, Final Cut, Hacking

Right, zero, right, right, right , zero, right I used to go, rejecting images quickly with Aperture 1.1. But Aperture 1.5 changed the Reject key to nine. Nine? That's three keys away on the numeric keypad.

So lets change zero back to being the Reject key.

The simple modification described below swaps 0 and 9 on the keypad, but not on the main keyboard. So zero becomes the Reject key and nine becomes the Unrated key. It uses a text editor (TextEdit will work fine) and no special tools or skills.

1. Quit Aperture

2. Find the Aperture application on your disk (in Applications probably) and control click it. Select Show Package Contents. You will see a single folder called Contents.

3. In the Finder window search box top right type keycode as below:

Four files will be listed (you will probably have generic document icons on those files instead of the icon you see above). Those four file are identical. Each exists in a different folder inside Aperture, corresponding to English, Japanese, French and German language localizations. You can see where each document is by looking at the bottom of the Finder search window:

4. Select the one you want according to your language setting. Option-drag it to the desktop. This is your back-up copy in case you want to restore to the original settings.

5. Control-click the KeycodeMapping.strings file you chose in (4) above and select Open With > Other. Find a simple text editor such as TextEdit or TextWrangler and select it to open the file. It is a plain text file so needs an editor than can handle plain text. You are going to modify this file. Here is what the file contains:

The "from" line contains the keypad key codes for the keys 0 through 9. The "to" line contains the main keyboard codes for the numbers 0 through 9. Change the text to look like this:

The changes simply swap the first and last numbers, making the 0 and 9 keys on the numeric keypad swap functions.

6. Save the file with command-S and quit the editor

7. Repeat for other three languages if you like (you don't have to make any more back up copies)

8. Close the Finder search window

Launch Aperture and try it out.

To put Aperture back the way it was, repeat the steps, this time swapping the two numbers back. The file you saved to the desktop is your reference for what it should look like.

Tags: Aperture, Hacking, Rejects

I found this article that delves into the SQLite database that lies inside the Aperture library. There are other Aperture articles on this site on performance, and downsampling.

Tags: Aperture, Library, Database, Hacking

A Dark Reading article describes how USB drives were used to break into a credit union's systems by simply leaving them around.

Once I seeded the USB drives, I decided to grab some coffee and watch the employees show up for work. Surveillance of the facility was worth the time involved. It was really amusing to watch the reaction of the employees who found a USB drive. You know they plugged them into their computers the minute they got to their desks.
Social engineering at it s best.

Tags: Security, Hacking, Interesting Stuff