Thumbnails
Aperture: Use The Thumbnail To Preview Crops
2008-01-20
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:
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:
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How To Create High Quality Thumbnails Of Document Pages
2007-12-31
While publishing my book Get Your Head Around Aperture 1.5 I figured out how to create high-quality page thumbnails like the one above. It is almost possible to read the body text, and the small blue title is certainly readable: Importing Images From A Single Folder, even though the characters are tiny. The word Images is only 5 by 19 pixels.
I first tried taking screen shots and reducing the images in Photoshop, but that resulted in a horrible loss of detail and a very fuzzy look. The page size reduction was being carried out as though it were a photograph, not a page of text. I needed a way of maintaining the character information through the size reduction.
To create the high quality page thumbnails I printed the pages I needed to a PDF file:
Then viewing the generated page in Preview, reduced the page size until it was what I needed:
Since the PDF was being rendered at the reduced size, the detail was still present. Last, I took a screenshot with SnapzPro2 and added a thin border and drop shadow with the media inspector in RapidWeaver:
This also gives me an image with the drop shadow rendered in: I just click and drag the image from the published web page to my desktop.
Aperture: How Big Should My Library Be?
2007-12-06
For 13,000 images, that works out to 540k each, about right in my estimation. The space is used mainly by the thumbnails that Aperture stores for each version.
Here I have a small project with 13 images, all referenced. None of them have previews. To look inside, I open my library with control-click and select Show Package Contents, then navigate down to the project and open that the same way:
Pretty much everything is small except for the AP.Minis and AP.Thumbnails files. The former holds 256 pixel thumbnails at 16 bits per pixel, 128K per image. The latter holds 1024 pixel JPEGs, about 415k each. The whole project is 7.3MB, so those two thumbnail files account for about 95% of the space used. This also shows why vaults are smaller than libraries: they omit the thumbnails.
Creating high resolution previews for these images would add somewhere between 2MB and 5MB per image, depending on the size and fidelity of the JPEGs generated. That would boost the project size by between 26MB and 65MB, a significant increase over the current 7.3MB.
The library has some overhead beyond the projects it contains. By opening the library with control click and Show Package Contents I can see the files at the top level:
The biggest non-project item is the database file at 2.2MB Not particularly significant in this 7GB library.
To a very rough approximation the library size is given by:
(number of managed masters * master size) + (number of versions * 500k) + (number of previews * 3MB)
Aperture: Compare Many Images Quickly
2007-11-02
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.
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.
Aperture: Display Full Captions and Keywords For Thumbnail Images
2007-10-20
By selecting which metadata is displayed with thumbnails I have two useful sets of information at my fingertips. One set consists of information I have added to the image: star rating, adjustments, keywords, captions, so it is blank if I have done nothing. The other set is full of numeric data that came with the image: its size, name, shutter speed, aperture, etc. I switch between the two of them with shift U.
But Aperture limits the display to a single line, so unless the thumbnails are displayed at an enormous size I can only see the first part of the metadata:
And that is a problem. Are those words captions, keywords, or what? And how can I see what else there is?
There are a couple of ways to get information on individual images. The metadata pane (capital I) will show everything I have set up in the metadata view selected:
But that uses up screen real estate all the time. I can also press the T key and have the metadata tooltip come up:
That saves the space used by the metadata pane, and I can just move the cursor to any image that interests me, but it still displays information for only one image at a time.
A better solution, and one that is available with a keypress, is to look at my images in list view. I can click the button at the top left of the browser, or more quickly, hit control L:
The thumbnail images are replaced with a dense display that shows one data for one image on each line (shift W is sometimes needed here to "rotate" the display for extra width). The currently selected images are shown with a white background, so it is easy to identify them. The list can be quickly sorted by clicking on a column, and the columns widened so that the whole caption and keyword list is visible:
And if I go back into grid view (control G) the sorting column I selected stays and the thumbnails are displayed in Caption order, grouping all those with no caption at the top:
The list view columns can be reordered, to put the caption on the left for instance, but unfortunately that change does not stick. To change the order of the columns permanently, a visit to the metadata pane is required -- the order of the columns in the list view is reflected in the order of the items in the metadata view that is applied to the list view. That's a mouthful, because there two steps needed to set this up.
To customize the list view, first press command J and select metadata views for the two list sets:
The set that is displayed can be switched on the fly with shift U just like the grid views. Here I am using List - Basic for one and List - Expanded for the other. I can use any metadata view I like, including new ones I have created.
Now by closing the View Options window and selecting one of those List views in the metadata pane, I can edit it to choose what it displays and in what order. I'm going to modify List - Expanded:
I can rearrange the items into the column order I want. I put the caption first by dragging the Caption field to the top:
And then move the Keywords field to the next spot. To end the editing, I deselect the button at the bottom of the metadata pane:
and the set-up is complete.
Looking at the list view I see that the Caption and Keywords are on the left, or at least as far left as they can go, since the Version Name column is always shown on the left:
I can create any number of different column arrangements and select two of them up at a time to be toggled with shift U.
Finally I can see all my captions and keywords in their full glory just by pressing control L. Control G gets me back the grid view.
But Aperture limits the display to a single line, so unless the thumbnails are displayed at an enormous size I can only see the first part of the metadata:
And that is a problem. Are those words captions, keywords, or what? And how can I see what else there is?
There are a couple of ways to get information on individual images. The metadata pane (capital I) will show everything I have set up in the metadata view selected:
But that uses up screen real estate all the time. I can also press the T key and have the metadata tooltip come up:
That saves the space used by the metadata pane, and I can just move the cursor to any image that interests me, but it still displays information for only one image at a time.
A better solution, and one that is available with a keypress, is to look at my images in list view. I can click the button at the top left of the browser, or more quickly, hit control L:
The thumbnail images are replaced with a dense display that shows one data for one image on each line (shift W is sometimes needed here to "rotate" the display for extra width). The currently selected images are shown with a white background, so it is easy to identify them. The list can be quickly sorted by clicking on a column, and the columns widened so that the whole caption and keyword list is visible:
And if I go back into grid view (control G) the sorting column I selected stays and the thumbnails are displayed in Caption order, grouping all those with no caption at the top:
The list view columns can be reordered, to put the caption on the left for instance, but unfortunately that change does not stick. To change the order of the columns permanently, a visit to the metadata pane is required -- the order of the columns in the list view is reflected in the order of the items in the metadata view that is applied to the list view. That's a mouthful, because there two steps needed to set this up.
To customize the list view, first press command J and select metadata views for the two list sets:
The set that is displayed can be switched on the fly with shift U just like the grid views. Here I am using List - Basic for one and List - Expanded for the other. I can use any metadata view I like, including new ones I have created.
Now by closing the View Options window and selecting one of those List views in the metadata pane, I can edit it to choose what it displays and in what order. I'm going to modify List - Expanded:
I can rearrange the items into the column order I want. I put the caption first by dragging the Caption field to the top:
And then move the Keywords field to the next spot. To end the editing, I deselect the button at the bottom of the metadata pane:
and the set-up is complete.
Looking at the list view I see that the Caption and Keywords are on the left, or at least as far left as they can go, since the Version Name column is always shown on the left:
I can create any number of different column arrangements and select two of them up at a time to be toggled with shift U.
Finally I can see all my captions and keywords in their full glory just by pressing control L. Control G gets me back the grid view.
Aperture: How Do I Fix Thumbnails That Bring Up The Wrong Image?
2007-07-25
It looks like your thumbnails have been corrupted. Rebuilding the database won't fix that, so you'll need to delve into the affected library. It's easy to fix.
Another symptom of corrupted thumbnails is that they look like this:
To fix, quit Aperture and locate the Aperture library with the problem. Control-click on the library icon and select Show Package Contents:
A Finder window will open. Navigate down through the folders (they correspond to the blue folders in your Aperture library) until you get to the project with the problem thumbnails:
Open that project with a control-click Show Package Contents and locate these three files:
Drag those to trash, or select them and hit command-delete.
Close the windows that you opened, and launch Aperture. Aperture will immediately start regenerating the thumbnails, and that could take a little while. To see what it is doing, click on Window > Show Tasks List and you'll get a count-down of the number of images still to process:
When it is done, all should be well, at least with that project. You'll need to repeat this with each affected project in the library.
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