Apple's Aperture + Flickr integration, handle with care, or else...
If you are using Flickr with Aperture NEVER use Browse Filters when you are in a Flickr Album.
First of all a little background.. I've always been interested in photography, and lately I've had the chance of turning this into a hobby. Seven years ago we bought a 'pro-sumer' camera (Canon Powershot G3) with the idea of taking some photography classes, but that never actually happened and we used the camera as a regular point and shoot with better results than regular P&S cameras of that time though. It wasn't until a couple of years ago that thanks to a friend I was motivated enough to take the dust out of the camera and started the learning path to photography.
First of all a little background.. I've always been interested in photography, and lately I've had the chance of turning this into a hobby. Seven years ago we bought a 'pro-sumer' camera (Canon Powershot G3) with the idea of taking some photography classes, but that never actually happened and we used the camera as a regular point and shoot with better results than regular P&S cameras of that time though. It wasn't until a couple of years ago that thanks to a friend I was motivated enough to take the dust out of the camera and started the learning path to photography.
Fast forward a couple of years, my G3 died after a trip to Florida when I experimented with time lapse photography, (the diaphragm decided that the camera had enough and one of the blades broke); that basically put a stop to my photography learning process, I borrowed my wife's point and shoot camera but it didn't feel like I had much control over anything.. well I was really lucky that my parents wanted me to keep taking pictures and gave me a new camera as a Holiday present, it was a Canon 7D
!!!! a huge jump from my G3. Needles to say I started taking a lot of pictures and again thanks to my friend I joined some events from a local photography group in Houston; one of those events was a photo contest from an Opera presentation, the photos had to be posted to Flickr to enter the contest and I joined Flickr, payed to turn my free account into a "Pro" (all you can eat, or should I say upload) account and started uploading my photos.
!!!! a huge jump from my G3. Needles to say I started taking a lot of pictures and again thanks to my friend I joined some events from a local photography group in Houston; one of those events was a photo contest from an Opera presentation, the photos had to be posted to Flickr to enter the contest and I joined Flickr, payed to turn my free account into a "Pro" (all you can eat, or should I say upload) account and started uploading my photos.
I was using iPhoto at that time but with the 7D
I needed a better program that could give me more options to work with my photos and manage my picture library, enter Apple's Aperture (which I think is a very nice program for photographers and has most of the features that an amateur photographer could need without falling into the Photoshop area). One of the features is the integration of your library to online photo sharing services like Apple's Mobile Me (now iCloud), Facebook and Flickr.
I needed a better program that could give me more options to work with my photos and manage my picture library, enter Apple's Aperture (which I think is a very nice program for photographers and has most of the features that an amateur photographer could need without falling into the Photoshop area). One of the features is the integration of your library to online photo sharing services like Apple's Mobile Me (now iCloud), Facebook and Flickr.
The integration of Aperture with Flickr is the purpose of this post and I would like to talk about one of the most annoying things I've experienced while sharing my photos with this tool, this plugin follows a different logic for photo sharing than a regular plugin; what Apple did was to match the behavior of their Mobile Me Photo Library's synchronization with Flickr, that is that any update or action that affects a photograph will be reflected anywhere it the image was shared; what that means is that if I do some post processing, update the metadata or even delete the photo all this actions will also happen with the image you uploaded to your Flickr library..
If you think about it for a sec the concept seems ok, if you find out that a photo was missing some keywords, or maybe you want to fine tune white balancing, etc. those changes will be updated for you in Flickr, the problem is when you want to separate your personal library and your Flickr library like if for some reason you want to remove an image from your library but you want it to still be in Flickr.. that will not work..
Now,lets leave that aside and think for a sec that this is the way things should be and we all agree that we need to keep everything in sync that is .. if it worked correctly.
There is a painful thing that is completely broken with this type of synchronization.. and that is filtering. In Aperture as well as other photo management programs you have the ability to categorize your photos and then apply filters so you can easily rate/color code them and work on subgroups at a time, this process works very well in your main Library, you basically select the star rating or color code for each photo and then apply a filter to hide the photos you don't to see at the moment. I use this all the time to mark which photos I'll be publishing to Flickr, I mark them with an Orange label that I designated for my Flickr photos, so far so good..
The problem lies when you don't process all photographs in a Project at once.. if you have a large number of photos and you marked and published some of them to Flickr you still need to get back at some point and continue working with the rest; in my case I usually flag the photos I like on a first pass then go over those one more time to remove similar photos and do post processing and finally I publish them to Flickr and mark them with the orange label.
When I'm ready to publish I select the photos from my Library and then drag and drop them into their Flickr Album from the Aperture navigation tree, once Aperture is done publishing it will take me to that album in the browser mode (or any other mode I was when I did this), if I apply a filer when I'm IN the Flickr Album then (as anyone would expect) it will filter the images by whatever criteria you selected and hide all others.. but the plugin not only hide the photos that don't match the criteria for some reason I don't really understand Aperture thinks that by filtering you really wanted to remove (not only hide) those images from the Flickr album, and here is where everything goes south, I've been burned by this more times that I want to admit, it took me a while to understand what was going wrong; I was inadvertenly filtering images when I was in the "wrong" album and then when I went to my Flickr photo stream my images were gone! I Initially blamed Flickr and even wrote to tech support..
One huge difference between Apple's photo sharing service and Flickr is that images on Flickr are "Social", they have comments, people mark them as favorites, you add them to groups, people invite them to groups, Flickr keeps track of the view count, people will get external links to them and use them in sites, etc. on the other hand your typical Apple album is a collection of static images.. so when you remove a photo from Apple's album you just need to put it back, re-sync and you're done, however when you remove a photo prom a Flickr album you'll loose all references and everything listed above that has to do with your photo and THAT IS PAINFUL.. specially if your photo has been published, or linked from a source you care.. if you put back the image into the Flickr and sync, will see that it is treated as a new image and all comments/ favorites, etc. are gone, you can't go and ask the people that made comments to add them back.. you can't ask people that selected your photo for a collection to add it back.. (we'll technical you could if you had all the info and you wanted to invest all that time to try to recover everything you lost)....
I really hope that Apple can get it's plugin to a point where it is useful to work with Flickr, they have their own service and this might not be a priority but Flickr is not a new or unknown site, plus the idea is to provide all the necessary tools to make your life easier.. not the other way around.
I have established a workflow to avoid this but I still need to be very very careful where I'm at before applying a filter.. this might not be the best way to publish or work with Flickr but its how things are.
I'm currently considering stop using the Flickr plugin and publish everything manually, part or the reason is the problem described in this post, and other part is that Aperture will not add a watermark to the photos when they are exported and published to Flickr.. but thats a story for another time..
Are there any others using the Flickr -Aperture plug in out there?
If you think about it for a sec the concept seems ok, if you find out that a photo was missing some keywords, or maybe you want to fine tune white balancing, etc. those changes will be updated for you in Flickr, the problem is when you want to separate your personal library and your Flickr library like if for some reason you want to remove an image from your library but you want it to still be in Flickr.. that will not work..
Now,lets leave that aside and think for a sec that this is the way things should be and we all agree that we need to keep everything in sync that is .. if it worked correctly.
There is a painful thing that is completely broken with this type of synchronization.. and that is filtering. In Aperture as well as other photo management programs you have the ability to categorize your photos and then apply filters so you can easily rate/color code them and work on subgroups at a time, this process works very well in your main Library, you basically select the star rating or color code for each photo and then apply a filter to hide the photos you don't to see at the moment. I use this all the time to mark which photos I'll be publishing to Flickr, I mark them with an Orange label that I designated for my Flickr photos, so far so good..
The problem lies when you don't process all photographs in a Project at once.. if you have a large number of photos and you marked and published some of them to Flickr you still need to get back at some point and continue working with the rest; in my case I usually flag the photos I like on a first pass then go over those one more time to remove similar photos and do post processing and finally I publish them to Flickr and mark them with the orange label.
When I'm ready to publish I select the photos from my Library and then drag and drop them into their Flickr Album from the Aperture navigation tree, once Aperture is done publishing it will take me to that album in the browser mode (or any other mode I was when I did this), if I apply a filer when I'm IN the Flickr Album then (as anyone would expect) it will filter the images by whatever criteria you selected and hide all others.. but the plugin not only hide the photos that don't match the criteria for some reason I don't really understand Aperture thinks that by filtering you really wanted to remove (not only hide) those images from the Flickr album, and here is where everything goes south, I've been burned by this more times that I want to admit, it took me a while to understand what was going wrong; I was inadvertenly filtering images when I was in the "wrong" album and then when I went to my Flickr photo stream my images were gone! I Initially blamed Flickr and even wrote to tech support..
One huge difference between Apple's photo sharing service and Flickr is that images on Flickr are "Social", they have comments, people mark them as favorites, you add them to groups, people invite them to groups, Flickr keeps track of the view count, people will get external links to them and use them in sites, etc. on the other hand your typical Apple album is a collection of static images.. so when you remove a photo from Apple's album you just need to put it back, re-sync and you're done, however when you remove a photo prom a Flickr album you'll loose all references and everything listed above that has to do with your photo and THAT IS PAINFUL.. specially if your photo has been published, or linked from a source you care.. if you put back the image into the Flickr and sync, will see that it is treated as a new image and all comments/ favorites, etc. are gone, you can't go and ask the people that made comments to add them back.. you can't ask people that selected your photo for a collection to add it back.. (we'll technical you could if you had all the info and you wanted to invest all that time to try to recover everything you lost)....
I really hope that Apple can get it's plugin to a point where it is useful to work with Flickr, they have their own service and this might not be a priority but Flickr is not a new or unknown site, plus the idea is to provide all the necessary tools to make your life easier.. not the other way around.
I have established a workflow to avoid this but I still need to be very very careful where I'm at before applying a filter.. this might not be the best way to publish or work with Flickr but its how things are.
I'm currently considering stop using the Flickr plugin and publish everything manually, part or the reason is the problem described in this post, and other part is that Aperture will not add a watermark to the photos when they are exported and published to Flickr.. but thats a story for another time..
Are there any others using the Flickr -Aperture plug in out there?
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