I'm a bit of a shutterbug, so Photo Stream is something I was really interested in when it was announced as part of iOS 5's feature set way back in June. Frictionless, automated sending of photos from my phone to my computer? Sign me up!

Of course, as is too often the case with Apple, the nitty gritty of how this would work wasn't explained in any detail -- particularly for Aperture, which often takes a back seat to iPhoto when Apple is showing off its apps.

Hopefully, this article will answer all your questions about how these two products interact. If not, please leave a comment pointing out what I've overlooked.

Before we start, some basic housekeeping. Photo Stream isn't going to appear in your Aperture at all if you don't first upgrade to v3.2. You'll also need OS X 10.7.2 or later, and iOS 5 on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. If you've done all that, you're all set.

What’s become obvious is that there’s a point at which you don’t want all of your photographs staring you in the face. You don’t even want them to surface in your catalog nor do you want them slowing you down when you search or browse. Yet, you don’t really want them totally out of your life. For any number of reasons—some of which make sense, and others which sound like the things a hoarder might say—you want to be able to dig back through those photos at a later date and maybe promote a photo that’s become more meaningful.

Aperture and Lightroom—both of which want to be the one true solution—don’t really help you with this on their own, at least not after some tens of thousands of images stack up. As the photos continue to pour in, both Aperture and Lightroom start to loose their grace and can get downright unwieldy. But who’s to say that you have to let Aperture or Lightroom be the master of all your photos? The answer is that you don’t.

This is just wicked cool, and precisely the kind of reason that using Apple’s entire ecosystem works so well.

By now we all know that you can shoot a photo on your iPhone and, with iOS 5 and iCloud, have that photo show up in your Photo Stream in Aperture or iPhoto.



We know that you can edit your photos in the new (minimal) photo editing feature in the iPhone’s built-in Photos app.



But did you know that the edits you make aren’t only not-permanent, but are actually translated to Aperture (and presumably iPhoto) as actual Adjustments?? (obviously I didn’t either until just a few minutes ago, or I wouldn’t be so excited!)

I think my question has been answered. … (Think, needs time to be sure, but so far it works)

Started Aperture with Command-Option held down on Aperture startup, and ran the fix permissions tool. … It did say that it was changing some image permissions to owned by current user.

Then I started Aperture with Command-Option held down on Aperture startup, and ran the Repair Library took. ... I did not notice any thing changing when I repaired the library with that tool.

…

But the end result of doing both those things is that, so far, my machine does not process the library every time I restarted Aperture today.

You can have all of your photos and movies managed by one database, yet still use the necessary tools to get the job done. Many of my current assignments require that I deliver both video and images. A workflow that will keep you from going crazy it to upload everything into Aperture 3.

For simple video pieces, you can edit video in Aperture. If you need more tools, then iMovie '11 can tap into your Aperture library for content, create and output movies, without duplicating the source material. This gives you one set of master footage, but multiple production options.

3. Removing Keywords from Multiple Images
As much as I try not to do dumb things, I sometimes mis-label animals and plants in groups of images or misspell keywords. If you look under the menus, the only "remove" commands for keywords will either remove the keyword if it's in the current keyword set or remove all keywords from the image. It's possible to remove individual keywords from individual images by using the "Keywords" button in the metadata inspectur, but It's not very clear how you can remove one specific keyword from multiple images, without first adding it to a keyword set. However, there is a way to just remove 1 keyword

1. Press shift-D if necessary to show the keyword controls in the control bar.
2. Select the photos with the unwanted keyword in the browser
3. Put focus on the keyword entry field in the control bar either by clicking in it or by pressing option-`. You could also select "New Keyword" from the Metadata menu.
4. Slowly begin typing the unwanted keyword in the field. Aperture autofills the keywords. I usually type only the first few letters; Aperture presents a list and I use the up and down arrows to select the keyword. Note that you haven't pressed enter or return yet.
5. Press shift-return to remove the keyword from all of the selected photos. If you had pressed just return, then Aperture would have added the keyword to the photos. Shift-return does the opposite.
6. Notice that focus is still on the keyword field. Press enter or escape to exit the field. It can be frustrating to forget the focus is in there as you press keys to do other things. I do that all the time.