Selective Import in Aperture 3
In previous versions of Aperture you had 2 big import option buttons: Import All and Import Selected. This allowed you to quickly and easily import the whole memory card or just (most likely) the last few shots. This works great: I find it hard to imagine myself not wanting to do one of those actions.
Aperture 3 changes things. You now tell Aperture what images to import by checking them much as you would if you were importing video from a non-tape-based video camera in iMovie. There are Check All and Uncheck All buttons and the sole import button is Import Checked. At first I though that this would be terrible if I wanted to import just the last 50 images shot when I have 50 images on a card (checking/unchecking 50 items!) but I found a shortcut today that I wanted to share.
Aperture will toggle the checked status of all selected images when you check/uncheck any selected image. This makes it very easy to select only the very specific images you may want – especially if they’re noncontiguous. Let’s say that you want to select the last 50 of 100 images. Easy. Uncheck All, select from image 51-100 and check any one of those images’ checkbox. Viola all 50 are ready for import!
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This post has 17 comments
March 16th, 2010
It’s not as inituitive as the v2 solution though. Do you have an opinion on why apple have chosen that route? What advantages does it have?
March 17th, 2010
I have no idea why it changed, but it could be that it works better if you have a lot of discontiguous images to import. With the V2 and earlier method you would have to Command click everything but with v3 you can select a group, check/uncheck them and then select another group and so on… I think I’ll get used to the new method quickly – now that I know how it works!
March 17th, 2010
Thanks!! Just saved me a massively annoying task!
March 17th, 2010
I’m glad it helped!
April 12th, 2010
Thank you so much for posting this tip! It was driving me made that the images I selected I could not right click on and find some check all option. I only wish I had searched for a solution a few weeks ago.
Thanks again.
April 12th, 2010
You’re very welcome. It had me stumped as well and I figured I wouldn’t be the only one!
April 25th, 2010
Well, that’s massively unintuitive isn’t it!
Thanks to google and your page for highlighting the ‘obvious’ way to interact with this great new ‘feature’
Do you mind if I link to this in my blog?
April 26th, 2010
Glad you found the post helpful- link away!
May 2nd, 2010
Hi brett,
found a way to find the path of aperture3 libraries based on your work on aperture2. This line will get you the image path of the masters of the selected images:
“select imagePath from RKMaster where UUID=(select masteruuid from RKversion where uuid=’” & uuid & “‘)” & quote
uuid is the image id.
For more info:
http://www.l-camera-forum.com/leica-forum/digital-post-processing-forum/117334-aperture-3-0-1-metadata-information-3.html#post1317834
Sorry for spamming your comments – I have not found your mail address.
Thank you for the hints,
Sven
May 4th, 2010
No problem. I’m glad to see people building on what I have done.
Thanks!
June 6th, 2010
Thank you for this hint! I find this method of selective checking very unintuitive.
July 15th, 2010
awesome! thanks.
October 24th, 2010
This for me has to be labeled as a degradation of the the user interface, a really poor user interface design decision. In V2 I never made a mistake and imported all of the images on the card when I wanted only selected images. Now you have to:
1. Click the deselect images button
2. Select the images you want
3. Click the check button on one of the images.
in Version 2:
1. Select the images you want
Does anyone see a reason for taking a 1 step operation and turning it into a 3 step operation?
January 19th, 2011
Hi Brett,
Just wondering whether you can help me with getting rid of all the stacks that have been created after importing an iPhoto library into Aperture.
I would like to copy metadata from the iPhoto Original in the stack to the iPhoto Edited in the same stack and then delete the iPhoto Original (thus getting rid of the stack, I assume). I can do this manually but I have about 3000 stacks….
Any guidance would be highly appreciated!
Wopke
January 19th, 2011
Wopke-
That’s a tough one. Aperture doesn’t have any way to read Stacks via AppleScript. You can determine if an image is a Stack Pick or not but not which images belong to which stacks.
If you have the Stack collapsed and select its Pick Image then AppleScript only sees that image as selected. If you open the Stack and select all of the images in the Stack then AppleScript can see all of the selected images.
Are all of the images named in some way that you can determine which images belong together based on their names? If so, can you provide me with an example of some names?
Thanks-
October 17th, 2011
Thanks for the tip. Just switched from iPhoto to Aperture and made my first import. Was worried there for a moment when I didn’t see an ‘Import Selected’ button. There also doesn’t seem to be a way to sort photos to be imported by date, name etc in Grid View unlike in iPhoto, without switching to List View (yet another additional step they could have eliminated easily).
October 17th, 2011
Actually, you can sort by pretty much any attribute. On my Aperture setup, there is a sort popup at the top of the grid view that allows sorting by the most common attributes.