Synchronize Your Watches

When shooting with multiple cameras I like to get all my pictures time synched. That lets me sort all of my images by their time stamps. There's a few of ways to get your shots to report the same time stamps. The most obvious way is to just program the clocks in the camera. But what if you are shooting with other people? That's when post-shoot time synching in Aperture really comes into use. First, get the shooters to shoot the same subject at exactly the same time. Just count to 3 and shoot on 3... or is that after 3? Anyhoo, the picture doesn't need to be any good. You just need to have the same point in time to reference against. You can really do this at any time during the shoot, but it'll be easiest to do it in the beginning. Alternatively, you can bring up the Time & Date System Preference pane (or any accurate clock). Then take pictures of the screen and use that as a reference for adjusting the time. This is a little easier if you're just shooting with a lot of cameras -- which I found myself recently doing with 2 SLRs and 1 waterproof P&S and another P&S. Figure out what the time difference should be. Then select the photos for which you want to adjust the time. Under the Metadata menu, select Adjust Date & Time. Easy!

If you are traveling and change the time zone to the local time zone, make sure to use Metadata > Batch Change to set your photos to your home time zone. Aperture's not that good about handling time zones. Even if you tell Aperture what time zone your photos are, it doesn't really retain it. When you use any plug-ins, Aperture forgets what time zone the original photo came from and then time stamps the new version with the original time but current time zone of the Mac. For example, if the picture was tagged at 5:55PM GMT -5 and the Mac is currently GMT -8, after the picture has been run through a plug-in, the new time stamp on the edited photo will be 5:55PM GMT -8. This is why it's important to make the Batch Change to set photos to the home time zone. Hopefully this will get fixed in some future version of Aperture. I can see how this would be an issue for those photographers on the move.

Since I'm talking about time and complaining about bugs, here's a related problem. When exporting photos with the subfolder set to "Current Date," sometimes Aperture forgets what the current day is. Sometimes it thinks that yesterday is today. Just a minor issue, but one to look out for.