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:

Thorne sent me a great tip for creating stacks: the order in which the images are selected is reflected in their order in a stack.

For example, I select these three images in the order right, top, bottom:

I hit command K to make a stack from them:

This can save time, since if you want to create a stack with the images sorted into rating order, there is no need to create the stack and the reorganize it. Just click on the images in the order they are rated and create the ordered stack immediately.

I often use full screen mode with no visible filmstrip to show photos to people, clicking through them one at a time with right-arrow. It's quick because I don't have to wait for previews to render (necessary to use the built-in slide show feature of Aperture), but there are some disadvantages to doing things this way. First, I have to show all the images in the album or project: I can't make a selection. Second, at the end of the photos there sits the last one on the screen: no blank screen.

To fix both of these problems, I use command-click. Here's how:

• Make sure the display is in Primary Only mode (option R). This makes the viewer show only one of the selected images at once.

• Select images using shift-clicking and command-clicking until the selection is as desired

• Go into full screen mode with F

• The first selected image will be displayed -- command-click it

• The next image is displayed. Keep command-clicking until all images have been displayed. On command-clicking the last one, a blank screen will appear.

[Added from the comments:]

Add an image of your logo (or URL or whatever) to the album or project. It doesn't matter where it is in the browser, as long as you click on it *last* to add it. Then click on the first image you want to show and hit F. Now the last image to be shown will be the logo.

Using the method of display above, images are shown in the order added to the selection, so you can not only choose what to show, but the order as well and very easily.

One problem with keeping referenced masters on removable media such as DVDs or Firewire drives is knowing what is actually on them. Mounting the disk or drive brings the masters on line and the badges change from this:

to this:

But it is difficult to see just these images among the thousands and register which ones are on the drive that just mounted.

An email from Johan Elzenga suggested an easy way to see just the referenced images that are on the mounted drive: use a pair of smart albums. This first one finds all offline images. It is set up to work only on images for my 2006-05 project:

The File status setting is found in the action (cog) menu on the top right.

Its sibling shows all masters that are referenced and online. Since managed masters are always online, the Match setting at the top is set to All and two conditions are needed:

This makes the album only show masters that are online and referenced and in the 2006-05 project. And with either of these I can also use additional filtering, searching, and sorting in the browser window where the images are displayed to narrow my choice further.

The neat thing about these smart albums is that they will change their contents as disks are mounted and removed. Put in a DVD, watch the album. Eject it and put an another. Repeat.

If I am viewing an image in Aperture, how do I know how I got that image?

Aperture has no "reveal master" function, so although I can see the master just by pressing M, I cannot go directly to that master in its project. By looking at the filename in the inspector I can find all the images associated with it and paste that name into a filter and find them that way, but that is long-winded and incomplete.

What I really want is a history view added to the current two browser views (thumbnail and list). A history browser would look something like this:

The thumbnails for the current project or album are displayed vertically down the center of the browser, arranged in whatever order is currently selected. Horizontal lines could separate the image rows, but I am not sure that would add anything.

To the left of each thumbnail is a chain of ancestors. To the right is a tree of descendants. The tree extends vertically to show multiple descendants. Arrows point left to right to show descendency.

Metadata by default shows what each is, where it is, and when it was created. And there is a badge to show the masters. Masters created from other masters show the original master as an ancestor.

By clicking on a thumbnail you see the image in the viewer. There is a way of refocussing the history browser on a selected image so that its enclosing project or album is shown in the vertical strip.

Dragging image files onto Aperture normally just copies them into the library. If you hold down the command and option keys as you drag, then the image is added as a referenced master instead of a managed master.

I discovered SuperCal the other day. It's a display calibration utility that does not need expensive hardware. It displays patterns and you move sliders to adjust what you see. It is kind of like Apple's ColorSync Utility, but does a lot more and allows for much more precise adjustment. I tried it on my monitor and it seems to work well.

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.

With a screen full of thumbnails (hit V to make the viewer go away) for captioning or keywording, you can often find yourself wanting to view one or more images for a better look:

There is a very easy way to do this: hit F to go into full-screen mode:

If you have multiple images selected and are not in Primary Only mode, you'll see all of them displayed. To return to the thumbnails, just hit F again.

Can your viewer do this?

The movie above shows nine images in the Aperture viewer chasing around in a square. I'll show you how it is done.

In the thumbnail viewer (grid) make sure you have at least twenty images. Make the viewer visible and set the viewer into Multi mode (option U). Scroll to the top of the thumbnails and mentally label the first nine images from 1 to 9.

Click on the first image (number 1), then command click on eight more in the order 2 3 8 9 4 7 6 5. Once you have done that you will have nine images in the viewer.

Now hit command right-arrow a few times. Images appear in the middle and disappear on the left! Command left-arrow will do the opposite. Command arrow is the Slide function. By clicking on the images in that special order you defined how they slide on the screen.

Here are some things you can do with four images (click image to download movie):

To slide two images up together, click in the order 1 2 3 4 and hit command-right twice in quick succession. To do a double down, the order is 4 3 2 1 and command-right twice. A double left is 1 3 2 4, and a double right is 4 2 3 1. So expressed in shorthand this is:

1 2 3 4 RR slides up
4 3 2 1 RR slides down
1 3 2 4 RR slides left
4 2 3 1 RR slides right

You can make four images rotate too. Try these. This time they use a single command-right key:

1 4 2 3 R clockwise, enter top right
3 2 4 1 R clockwise, enter bottom left
2 3 1 4 R counter, enter bottom right
4 3 1 2 R clockwise enter top left

This next one I call "the rocket" (click image to download movie):


Notice that you have to use seven images for this one.

1 4 5 7 R Rocket to top right
1 7 5 2 R Rocket to top left

It works with six images too, but this is different. Depending on the shape of the viewer six images can be arranged in either two rows or two columns. Here is a six image rotate for two rows (click image to download movie):

For two columns, these patterns work:

1 2 3 4 5 6 RR Double slide up
1 4 3 6 5 2 R Kisses, new middle right

The last one I call "kisses" because all the images kiss in the middle. With two rows you can do these:

1 3 5 2 4 6 RR Double slide left
1 3 5 4 6 2 R Kisses, new bottom middle
1 2 3 6 5 4 R Counter clockwise, bottom left

And here are some tricks with nine images. First a kiss (click image to download movie):

1 2 3 8 9 4 7 6 5 R Rotate counterclockwise new in the middle
1 3 5 8 9 7 6 4 2 R Kiss

The last one, another rocket, needs more than 18 images to work (click image to download movie):

1 4 8 5 9 12 16 13 18 R Rocket to top right

Now it's your turn.