I’m approaching Aperture with a snapshot and professional perspective here. As I use Aperture for my family pics as well as professional photography.
So, the next lines will be about how I would make it better for the users, of course, it’s not up to me, and I would appreciate comments and feed back.
UI
Option to open project windows, just like iTunes.
Collapse all projects and folders.
Syncing Features
Folder Sync/Export
It’s like publishing to a MobileMe or Flickr, but aimed to a folder. What makes different, and better, to export feature is that, you will have it syncronized to your library. Let’s say you have PSD layered files in Aperture + RAW + JPGs, all different kinds, the you select them, push the “sync to folder” button, choose the file format you want, size, etc… all images will be exported to that folder as you wanted. If you change any photo, name, retouching, crop, keywords and sync, it’ll keep the folder up-to-date.
As an advanced feature, this would have a 2-way sync as well, for advanced users to work as a team. By selecting this option, the photos would be exported to a folder where other users could retouch them. Once they finished, you would sync, and the retouched photos would replace the ones in your library. The previous images would have to go under a “replaced images” place, just like a rejected status.
Deeper Flickr Pro Management
I would URGE Apple to give Aperture a deeper control over the images and it’s metadata in Flickr or other photo sharing online services. And option to add or replace images in Flickr, keep track of photos within sets without duplicating them.
Simple upload:
Just choose the images, drag them over your Flickr Account icon.
Advanced Control:
Setup Flickr to sync with Aperture, it will give you complete control and feed-back from Flickr Pro account.
It will get all set names from Flickr and bring it as “albuns” in a dedicated Flickr panel. It will allow you to add or replace photos in Flickr, keeping all the viewing status in Flickr, and bringing viewing count from Flickr and all the other metadata.
When adding a Flickr account to Aperture, you could import only the preview and it’s metadata or choose to download the original file from Flickr.
Take a look at Flickery for example. It’s a content manager for Flickr. If Aperture could incorporate that sort of control level, it could make Aperture more popular within the Flickr comunity.
FaceBook Photos
The same way it’s suggested above for Flickr, FaceBook could have the photos managed in Aperture/iPhoto, it’s privacy settings controlled by Aperture. This would save a lot of time. Face tagging could be retrieved too.
Client Sharing
Showing, rating, sharing…
The delivering of the images could be taken with a different aproach here. It would have a site/e-mail/ftp methods. Let’s say you finished the photoshoot, rejected a few and now the client needs to select the ones he wants. Aperture would create a website with thumbnails and highres for download (optional). The big difference to the current website tool in Aperture today is that you can comment, approve, rate, change titles, caption and keywords through the website (MobileMe), this way, the client can login with it’s e-mail and password to your site, change the metadata information so you can use Aperture to interact with the client.
When exporting the site, Aperture e-mail your client to let them know that you uploaded the site, as well as when you update it.
Face Recognition
Picasa is noticibly better in matching faces. Aperture needs to be better. It needs a better way of doing the matching and the interface needs to use Apple inteligence. At the moment, it’s incovenient, not practical and not reliable.
UI
The first user interface you see is the “corkboard” with the names and faces. I like it, but I want to like it more!
We need groups of people, lets say, Office, Family, Friends, Strangers, Relatives…. that way, each group could have their own unknown people. To explain better, you can say that “Charlie” is a work collegue, so… Charlie has a face tag “Charlie” and he belongs to Work group. In the same picture, there are a few other people that I don’t know their names, so I tag them as “Work”. Becouse “Work” is a place, not a name, the face tag will work differently than the usual face tag. It will group all people I tagged as work with unnamed.
Unnamed faces will group themselves by face similarity, naming a cluster, will add the face tag in all faces within the cluster. The cluster could me similiar to stacks.
Late shift background work
This is a concept based on queuing, that might involve the OS. Uploading tasks, finding and matching faces, finding duplicates, rebuilding databases, updating vault, all this tasks could have a “queue”, so you work during the day and when you are going home, you resume the queue, so Aperture stays working for you and let you know by e-mail when it’s done, shutting itself down when it finishes all.
These features are a few of my ideas to improve Aperture, if you have more, please comment, I’ll add to the post.
O 
