Deadly Bloody Serious

• When importing CDs, iTunes keeps warning me about over-writing stuff. Weird. Maybe it’s ejecting, then sucking it back in whilst I’m out of the room.
• DO THE METADATA!
• Apple category

I’ve experimented with moving masters to solve my dumb albums problem, and have both good and bad news.

The good news is: you can move masters from one project to another. The cursor won’t change to let you know what’s about to happen (unlike, say, adding photos to an album), but a black border will appear around the project name. When you let go of the mouse button, you’ll be given the opportunity to cancel. There’s no way to tell Aperture to not warn you next time. Thankfully, you shouldn’t be moving masters to other projects too often.

Any albums in the old project will survive: as the Move alert tells you, their references will be updated. It might seem weird to have an album in one project pointing to masters in another, but it makes sense when you consider an album named “Portfolio”, in which you’d really like your best photos from any and all projects.

The bad news is: “smart” albums will break. My “Mug Shots” smart folder, for example, no longer found photos with the tag — even after I moved it to the new project. I had to re-create it from scratch. I thank the gods I’m not moving a year’s worth of pictures to another project, losing all twelve of my by-the-month smart folders and any other date-constrained special event folders.

Can anyone recommend a good resource for using Automator with Aperture?

Aperture has made it to version 1.5 without the ability to exclude pictures based on keyword. I want to have my screen saver display this year’s pictures rated *** or better, but without those I took for work. I suspect I’ll have to export the masters and import them back to a new project.

Speaking of the screen saver: it’s wonderful that Apple have Mac OS X automatically treat Aperture albums as screen savers in their own right, but I find the behaviour of the Crop slides to fit on screen feature somewhat bizarre when it encounters a photo in portrait orientation.

When I shoot in portrait, the most interesting part of the photo is usually in the top third or so. I’d like to see that third, but for whatever reason OS X feels compelled to show me my subject’s feet or crotch instead. Oops.

Update: I’ve found more smart folder breakage. Lucky me!