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I’ve been exclusively using Aperture for about 6 months now, and absolutely love it. The non-destructive edits are liberating. The RAW support is fantastic. The workflow stuff is great. Vaults? Great. Loupe on RAW images? Perfection.

But, of course, I’ve got some gripes.

1. It’s hard to copy individual photos between computers. If I have Aperture on a desktop and a laptop, and I want to copy just a handful of photos and their metadata (stars, keywords, etc…) from the desktop to the laptop, I have 2 choices:
   1. create a new Project to contain these selected images, then export/import it. This would make me organize my photos according to which sets I want to move between computers, with no semantics retained.
   2. export the Masters for the selected photos from the desktop, copy them to the laptop (USB thumbdrive, sftp, whatever…) and import them as new photos. All non-EXIF metadata is lost, and has to be manually re-entered.

   But Aperture already has an “export metadata” option… Why not let me export just a selected set of photos (masters and versions) as well as their associated metadata, in a format that can be ingested into another Aperture without manual intervention or redundant/meaningless Projects used as interchange vectors?

2. No keyword tag cloud. I’ve got a BUNCH of keywords, but the keyword viewer (i.e., searching) is kinda sucky for that. I want a nice tag cloud.
3. Performance on my quad-G5 (with stock video card) is rather craptastic. If I disable the second display view, it’s marginally better, but it’s generally a dog on this box. It’s much faster on my MacBook Pro. I’d love it to run a bit better on the quad…
4. Albums sometimes forget their designated sort order. I use a “general” project, and it’s got a couple thousand images in it by now. Half the time, it decides to ignore my “newest first” sort order and show photos in “oldest first”. It’s kind of nice, to be occasionally reminded of the first photos I shot using Aperture, but it’s not how I told the album to be sorted. One additional click of the sort triangle, followed by a 2 second wait as the 2000 photos are reordered…

First, BlogBridge is a great app. It works very well, and fits into my RSS workflow better than anything else I’ve ever used. I can totally see myself using this app for a long, long time. With that in mind, here are some ideas for making it even better…

• Better MacOSX integration?
  • run as normal app with menubar in system’s, and app icon, etc… (as opposed to a generic java app)
  • accept feeds passed by other apps (safari’s RSS icon now spawns a fresh copy of BlogBridge, and then does nothing with the result)
  • Perhaps show a different dock icon when there are pending new items to read? Don’t have to show the count, just a flag to say “hey! there’s new stuff!”
  • Insane amounts of RAM (real and virtual) are being used on MacOSX.
  • When viewing a link in the browser, it should (optionally?) open the link in the background, rather than bringing the browser to the front.
• No search field?
  • creating a “SmartFeed” for a simple search isn’t ideal
• Article Cache
  • no option to save items for 30 days or 6 months or forever. Only an “Articles remaining after purge” setting. What does that mean?
• Image feeds
  • if I have a SmartFeed that pulls items from other Image Feeds (Flickr subscriptions), the items show in linear chronological view, even if all feeds are set to be “Image” feeds. There’s no way to set that for the SmartFeed itself.
  • If I have a feed that I manually set to be an “Image feed” by setting that flag on the subscription, the images are dimmed out unless the mouse is over the image. That doesn’t happen if I create a new SmartFeed for a Flickr tag. Inconsistent behaviour.
  • If I set a feed to be an “Image feed”, if I click on the image, nothing appears to happen. I have to right-click and select “open link in browser” (say, if I want to mark a Flickr image as a Favorite, or comment, etc…)
• Smart Feeds
  • I set a SmartFeed to use the parameters: “Feed Tag contains ‘Flickr’” and “Status is ‘Unread’”, thinking I’d get a handy SmartFeed for all unviewed Flickr images. But it didn’t find anything. I changed the first parameter to “Feed title contains ‘Photo’”, and it works fine. Hmm…

And then there’s the “synchronization” feature – where it syncs your settings with a server using an XML-RPC api. Very cool feature. But it hasn’t worked for me yet. Each time, it gives me a “communication error” message. Doh. Then, there’s the dialog that controls synchronizations:

The “more…” button displays an offset menu of options: “Only Load” and “Only Save” – but the status shows values for “Last Sync In” and “Last Sync Out” – is loading in? out? Is saving going to the server, or saving from it? Also, only one l in successful