I love using Aperture. As someone who has a lot of darkroom experience, I’m still amazed at the finessed control RAW processors like Aperture give photographers over their images. But, there’s still a few kinks to be worked out that may not be obvious.
Here’s the story.
I had spent around an hour working in the studio, using the (fantastic) DSLR Remote iPhone app to remotely shoot onto my laptop. Towards the end I got a few winners, and called it a day.
I packed up the studio, carried the laptop back to my office, and set up to start working. After firing up Aperture, I used the Import dialog to bring in the images from a folder on my desktop. Thumbnails stream into the project, followed by the camera’s preview images being replaced with Aperture’s own preview images.
After a minute, all the images seem to be imported and processed, so I send the original folder to the Trash. Back to Aperture: All but the final dozen images have been imported.
Even though Aperture had processed the images, the master RAW files were only mid-copy when I did my housekeeping. The final images were gone for good.
At this point, I was not a happy bunny.
I know this is a new feature in Aperture 3, and I appreciate the added speed to the overall workflow. My issue is that, for the images to appear in the library before any of the master images are copied, is confusing and misleading. The master files aren’t even locked to prevent their deletion during the import.
This is more of an observation than a complaint, but it has caused a day’s work to be lost. Let this be a warning to other Aperture users, while I wait for a response from inside of Apple.
— Thomas Riggs