To get started with Aperture 2.0, download the trial version and wait for the key to arrive in email. Then before launching it, rename your current Aperture application and rename your Aperture library. Renaming makes sure that 2.0 doesn't stomp on 1.5. I added 15 to the end of my application and my library. Also, make sure you have your 1.5 key handy. If you launch 1.5 after running the 2.0 trial, you'll have to reenter it.

The installer requests the key and the application installs. It creates a new Aperture Library and you can fill it with images and use that as a sandbox for a while.

Aperture 2.0 is fast. Adjustments are much faster, though there is a short delay before they are active. Even traditionally slow adjustments like Straighten and Shadows and Highlights are very responsive. I have a lowly 2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo iMac 24" and it really flies now. Scrolling is like iPhoto, and the new Quick Preview mode (P key) prevents Aperture from doing the RAW conversions, so making scrolling through images in the viewer very fast indeed.

Tags: Aperture, Updates, Speed

Jellyfish: 1/20s f/2.8 ISO1250 @55mm, Canon 30D, Canon EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8, adjusted, cropped

I've put together what I think is a comprehensive list of ways to speed up Aperture. Some are quick, some are cheap, some are neither.

Get A Faster CPU Or More CPUs
Up to a point more GHz and particularly more CPUs will speed up Aperture. I say up to a point because there are diminishing returns as processors are added. And because CPU speed is secondary to GPU speed. Which brings me to...

Get A Faster Graphics Card
Aperture is very GPU-intensive. If you are buying an iMac, get the fastest graphics option you can, and get the most VRAM you can. If you have a Mac Pro, then configure it with fastest graphics card option find with the most VRAM. When you have your card...

Plug The Graphics Card Into The Fastest Slot
That's going to be a 16x PCIe slot on most machines. Second best is an 8x slot. If you have two graphics cards then put the fastest one in the fastest slot. And to run two screens with Aperture...

Connect Both Screens To One Video Card
It's much faster to drive both screens from one card because the CPU only has to transfer the data once to the card to have it available on both screens. And also because that one card will be in the fastest slot. But even if you have two screens you can make things faster ...

Use The Smallest Screens That Are Useful
Yes a 30" Cinema display is very nice, but you will get more speed out of 23" simply because there will be fewer pixels to process. Another reason for smaller screens is that the larger the screen, the more VRAM is used, and so the less that is available for cached images and the slower the overall performance. Or if you don't need the second screen...

Use Just One Screen
One screen will be faster than two for all the reasons that apply to using a smaller screen.

Add More RAM To Your Mac
Running Aperture on a machine with less than 2G of DRAM is asking for slow. Consider 3G a minimum, particularly if using RAW.

Get A Faster Hard Drive Or Use Striped Hardware RAID
A faster hard drive will have some impact on the speed of Aperture, but not as much as you might expect. The fastest set-up will have internal or eSATA drives running in a striped arrangement so that data can be read from both drives simultaneously. Hardware RAID will ensure that writing is fast as well.

Make Sure You Have The Latest Version Of Aperture
Each release has run faster than the previous one, so be sure you are up to date. While you are at it...

Install Leopard
While Leopard does appear to have some odd problems for some Aperture users, it also runs faster and smoother. At some point Aperture will be optimized for Leopard, not just compatible with it and we'll see a big speed bump.

Set Processor Performance On Fastest
Older PPC machines and some laptops have a setting in the Energy Saver preferences to run the processor at different speeds. Select the Fastest setting.

Plug Your Laptop Into The Mains Power
I'm guessing here (since I don't have a laptop), but it is normal for laptops to run faster when plugged into mains power since they have no need to conserve power drain. Speed throttling when used on battery includes the GPU these days, so will have an impact on Aperture.

Turn Off Spotlight
If you have images on a drive or partition separate from your boot disk, disable Spotlight for that drive. This will prevent the OS from attempting to index and reindex the library and its images and will make things a little faster.

Reindex The Aperture Database
Each library has an SQLite database that exists to speed up access to all the images and metadata. Over time the index for this database gets fragmented and so is slower. So about every month or so, it is worth forcing that index to get rebuilt (see Applescript here). It takes a few minutes and can have dramatic results. It's much faster than if you...

Rebuild The Aperture Database
By starting Aperture with Option and Command held down, the database will be rebuilt. This can take a few hours because Aperture has to read all the files in the library to collect all the data and store it in a new database. But it can work miracles.

Turn Off Previews
Generation of high resolution previews can eat up a lot of processing capacity as well as disk space. If you don't need them, then turn them off and delete them. Thumbnails up to 1024 pixels are always generated, so there is nothing you can do about that.

Turn Off Sharing With iLife
Sharing previews with iLife uses an XML file that is regenerated when Aperture quits. This can take a long while if there are a lot of previews, so by turning off iLife sharing quitting can go faster. You will find the setting in Aperture's preferences.

Turn Off Anti-Virus
Anti-virus software is invasive and very resource-hungry. Turn it off for a dramatic improvement in speed.

Make Changes To The Keyword List With No Thumbnails Showing
In some circumstances changing the keyword list -- things like renaming or rearranging the keywords -- can go extremely slowly. These delays can be almost completely eliminated by ensuring that the browser is not showing any images when the keyword list is changed.

Use A Small Viewer
Since thumbnails are generated at 1024 pixels size, using a viewer that is equal to or smaller than that can give some speed up. The thumbnail is almost identical to the processed RAW image, so many decisions can be made immediately without having to wait for the full image to load.

Turn Off Automatic Version Generation For Adjustments
Aperture has a peculiar option in its preferences that make it generate a new version every time a slider is moved or a button clicked on the adjustments HUD. This makes things very slow since Aperture generates thumbnails for each of these versions. Turn that option off.

Use A Firewire Card Reader
Most card readers are USB and USB is not particularly fast. Firewire card readers can run at more than twice the speed, especially if using several of them at once.

When Adjusting, Crop First
That might seem like odd advice, but cropping first results in fewer pixels that must be calculated and displayed and hence faster operation. Since this is Aperture and the workflow is non-linear the crop can be adjusted at any time if you are not happy with it.

Turn Off All The RAW Fine Tuning Settings
The RAW Fine Tuning settings are all turned on by default. You may not actually need them, and if you turn them off you will find that RAW processing is quite a lot faster. You can do this by changing the settings on one image and then using lift and stamp on the others.

Don't Display The Histograms
Calculating the histograms takes time and computing resources. Turn them off if you don't need them, or hide the whole adjustments panel or HUD if they are not in use. The cog menu on the HUD gives control of the histograms.

Use Slow Adjustments Last
The Highlights, Shadows, Straighten, and Spot tools are notoriously slow. So after cropping first, do everything else except those next and finish up with the slow tools.

Don't Use Full Text Search
Aperture's full text search will do a linear search of all the text available, including captions. This makes it very slow for large libraries. Instead use a limited text search if you can. A limited text search only searches text that is indexed by the database, so is much faster. Change the setting by clicking the magnifying glass in the search box.

Don't Fill Disks To Capacity
A consequence of the constant rotational velocity of hard drives is that data close to the edge of the disk can be read and written at twice the speed of that close to the spindle. Disks are filled from the outside inwards because this gives the highest data rates for the first data written to the disk. As disks are filled to capacity, the data rate slows, so fill disks only to 50% to 75% capacity for best performance.

Keep Projects Small
Small projects are faster to work with in Aperture, probably because the opportunity for caching images and database information is greater. Less than 1000 images is a good rule of thumb. Use blue folders to combine small projects into larger groups for easier management.

Use JPEG Images
JPEG images are much faster to work with in Aperture than RAW or TIFF. Rather than use RAW for everything, use JPEG where you can get away with it. Either shoot JPEG or RAW+JPEG, or just get the levels right with RAW, export as JPEG and reimport for all the remaining operations.

Use Smaller Images
Smaller images are processed faster than larger images. So unless you need the pixels, don't put them into Aperture in the first place. Shoot at less than the camera's maximum resolution, or export and reimport JPEGs at a smaller size.

Delete Aperture's Preferences File
Some weird slow-downs and delays are cause by corrupted application preferences. you can rid yourself of these by removing the preferences file and restarting Aperture.

Did I miss any?

Tags: Aperture, Speed, Tips And Tricks

Jürgen Banda-Hansmann has written a short series of articles about Aperture that cover:

• Optimize Libraries
• Optimize your folder structure
• Personalize and structure your Keyword List
• Create your own Metadata Presets
• Autostacking

Tags: Aperture, Blogging, Metadata, Keywords, Folders, Stacks, Library, Speed, Presets

Photon is a RAW workflow utility designed to do one thing well: let me view and sort my images quickly before I import the good ones into a more heavyweight tool like Aperture or Lightroom.

As soon as I put my card into a reader, Photon starts reading and converting RAW files, putting thumbnails into the area on the left. I can start working with images right away: no need to wait for the download to finish. Photon maxed out both my CPUs as it downloaded at about 7MB per second from my USB card reader.

Across the top are stacks: general purpose bins for images. The currently selected stack populates the thumbnail pane, so clicking on a different stack shows me a different set of images. Each card initially goes into its own stack.

To process my images I scroll through the thumbnails with the left and right arrow keys and restack the images using whatever criteria make sense for me. Each stack has a single-key short-cut, called a hotkey (the numbers 1 and 2 in the screen shot above). I can reassign these to any keys I like. 7, 8, 9, X might relate to ratings. I could add a stack called T for trash and another called P for print. If I were shooting a wedding I could assign hotkeys for different locations or people. There is no need to drag and drop images, just pressing the hotkey moves the image to the stack assigned to that key and shows the next image in the viewer. I can process 1000 images with only 1000 key presses this way.

Zooming is simplicity itself: I click on the image and it zooms to 100% with the click point at the center:

I let go, and it returns to a scaled view. To make zooming persistent I can move the switch bottom right.

Once I have my images sorted, I am ready to export the images to disk. Since many of my images have no value and were either moved to a junk stack or skipped over, I only save some of the stacks. I can save the original RAW, or opt to have Photon convert to JPG, TIFF, or a number of other formats. Once done, I am ready to import my surviving images into Aperture or another application or process them further, maybe adding GPS data or keywords.

I found this 1.0 release of Photo to be stable and fast. There are a few rough edges to the interface and a need for refinement in some areas. Photon is short on features -- but that's good. It does what it claims to do well, and there is plenty of functionality that can be added later once customers start telling Green Volcano what they would like to see. The demo version does everything except save stacks.

Tags: Review, Photography, Applications, Aperture, Lightroom, Speed, RAW

There are times when I have a large number of images to process, and I need to do it quickly (or at least efficiently). I am at that point right now, having shot almost 3000 photos with my new Canon 30D and just thrown all of them into one project. Going through so many images in a reasonable amount of time boils down to locating chunks of similar images and comparing them against each other to pick the good ones. So how to compare as many images as possible at once?

First I make the workspace as big as possible. I go to Window > Layouts > Maximize Browser (option command B), press W to get rid of the project browser pane if it is still present, and press shift T to remove the toolbar at the top. Now the screen is full of thumbnails.

With hundreds of thumbnails on the screen it can make sense to arrange them into groups. If I'm going to compare pictures of a cat against each other then the job can be made much easier if they are all together, so either I drag them so they are adjacent, or even better select all the cat images and press command L to make a new album out of them.

But however I have these thumbnails arranged, if I have hundreds then they are too small for proper comparison. So I move the slider on the lower right all the way to the right to make the thumbnails as large as possible:

The large thumbnails are of a lower quality than the original, but it is possible to make judgements on them at this reasonable size. I can reject many right away by selecting them and hitting the 9 key.

To compare the images that remain I need more detail, and there are a couple of ways of doing this: Multi mode and Three-Up mode.

First I make sure I am in Multi mode:

Multi mode allows the viewer (and full screen view) to show multiple images at once. Primary mode shows just the currently selected image.

Then I select four adjacent images thumbnails that I want to initially compare:

By going to full screen with the F key I can make each fill almost a quarter of the screen:

To display more images I hit command left arrow or command right arrow twice, quickly. This scrolls the images up and down two at a time:

For a bigger view of one image, I can switch into Primary mode temporarily. Pressing option R fills the screen with the selected image. Pressing option U puts it back in Multi mode. To repeat with another on-screen image I click it and use option R, option U again.

Of course the loupe is always at hand, but can only look at one part of one image. No use for comparisons.

For even larger views, I use the zoom function. The disadvantage with using zoom is that with the limited VRAM on my machine (24" iMac with better graphics), going into zoom mode arbitrarily reduces the number of images from four to two or three, so losing my selection.

If four images is too many, how about three? There is another display mode called Three Up that I can use for comparisons:

To use Three Up mode, I select one image:

And then go full screen with F:

The selected image is in the center and the adjacent images are shown to either side. It's wasteful of screen space, but does the job. As I hit left or right arrow keys, the images scroll left and right. I can also click on the left or right images to make them scroll to the center.

To narrow down to just the center image and one other, I command click on the image I want. That adds that image to the selection and prevents Three Up mode from doing its magic. Command click on it again to restore the Three-Up display.

Pressing Z to zoom from Three Up mode gives me three full-size images that I can freely scroll around for comparison. Command space drag moves single images and shift command drag moves all of them together.

I've gone from roughly comparing hundreds of tiny thumbnails to comparing just three images in great detail. By rating or keywording I can pick the ones that I think are the best and then move onto another group of images.

Tags: Aperture, Comparing, Speed, Thumbnails

Feeding swallows: 1/4000s f/5.6 ISO1000 200mm, Canon 30D, EF 70-200 f2.8 L IS, adjusted and cropped

A big reason for going DSLR rather than sticking with the Canon S3 that I had is speed. Everything is faster. The 30D can shoot five frames a second compared to the S3's two frames a second. The photo above was part of such a burst: it had to be. The parent swallow was feeding its young in about two thirds of a second. Here are the frames:

While it can do five a second, I usually leave it on the three frames a second setting, because that leaves a lesser chance of shooting off two frames when I mean to shoot one. The swallows were shot at 1/4000s f5.6 ISO 1000.

The shutter speed of the S3 tops out at 1/3200, and that is only effective for f/8. It's half that for f/3.5.The photo below was taken at 1/8000s, as was the fountain picture I have posted previously.

Dogs playing: 1/8000s f/4.0 ISO800 200mm, Canon 30D, EF 70-200 f2.8 L IS, unadjusted

The higher shutter speed of the 30D gives me more range for a specific aperture, as well as being able to better freeze the action and use larger apertures.

Start-up time is zero. I don't turn the 30D off, just let it sleep, so there is no turn on time. I press the shutter and it wakes up and takes a photo. No waiting for the lens to extend.

Focusing is very fast and accurate. I tap the shutter and it focusses, simple as that, in a fraction of a second. No one-second delay while it hunts around for enough contrast. And the 30D almost always gets focus first time: only a few times when the light is very dim and I have pointed it at something flat has it failed to focus.

Zooming is manual, so it goes as fast as I can turn the ring. I no longer have to wait for the motor to whirr and the zoom to zoom.

The controls are faster too. Changing exposure offset or aperture is a quick flick of a dial. No press press press on buttons to go up and down, or trips to the menus.

Tags: DSLR, Speed, Swallows

Primate Labs has a page of Mac speeds measured with Geekbench. It's a simple combination of memory and CPU performance.

I still have one of these running at home:

It comes dead bottom of the list. A little slow, but fine for kids games, email, and web browsing.

Tags: Macs, Speed