While playing around with the Aperture database I decided to try to make something useful. The result is an Automator workflow that looks for duplicate master image names. Here’s the result. Disclaimer: it’s not pretty and the output goes so TextEdit instead of some fancy Cocoa application or Aperture album. Please give it a try and let me know if anything goes wrong. Find Aperture Duplicates v0.1

Most of the time we want more resolution in our images so they can be printed on bigger and bigger formats. However, for web publishing it’s important to have quality downsized version of our images. A question about how Aperture does this was raised on the Aperture discussion group about image downsizing. I used a few test images from Oshyan Greene’s website to find out. Here are the results. It’s hard to tell exactly what algorithm Apeture is using, but it’s probably bilinear filtering since it’s very easy to do using the GPU.

I’ve tried a couple Aperture folder hierarchies and this is the one that seems to work the best for me. Initially I imported my entire image collection into one library with subfolders for the date. I quickly realized that I was going to hit the 10,000 image-per-project limit. I’ve now decided on a different organization that has worked really well. The basic idea is major category folders at the top, year folders under that and all projects below that.

I’m working on decoding the Aperture database structure. Just playing around in the database has been very interesting. Update: this was written with Aperture 1.0 in mind. This is probably completely inaccurate now These tables are incomplete. However, they do contain the columns that I used in my test queries. Update: I just found a cool tool called SQLite Database Browser that makes it much easier to look around the db than using the command line sqlite3 tool.

Apple’s new Aperture program is awesome. It’s easily the best image cataloging program available, and it’s in version 1. However, the performance leaves quite a bit to be desired. Here are the things I’ve discovered. I used a combination of the fs_usage tool and the Thread Viewer tool to profile Aperture. Both excellent tools are included in the Developer package. I wanted to find out why it always takes 10 seconds for the search filter dialog to open up, causing the application to become unresponsive the entire time.