Operation Manual

Generating Previews for New or Active Projects
Because previews are used by the iLife and iWork Media Browsers as well as by the
Mac OS X screen saver, you can use previews as a way to distribute your Aperture pictures
in movies, on the web, on DVDs, in slideshows, and in podcasts using the applications in
iLife. You can also download your Aperture pictures to devices such as iPod, iTouch, and
iPhone; import your Aperture pictures into iPhoto; or use them to create Pages documents.
To share previews with other applications
1 Select the project whose images you want to share with other applications, then choose
Maintain Previews For Project from the Library Action pop-up menu (with a gear icon).
2 Make sure that Always is chosen in the “Share previews with iLife and iWork” pop-up
menu in Aperture preferences (choose Aperture > Preferences, then click Previews).
3 In the Library inspector, Control-click the project and choose Update Previews for Project
from the shortcut menu.
When the previews are built, you can open any of the iLife and iWork applications and
use your Aperture images.
Generating Previews for Smart Albums
You can create previews for images collected in Smart Albums. For example, you can
create previews for highly rated images only. For more information about working with
Smart Albums, see Grouping Images with Smart Albums.
To generate previews for Smart Albums
1 Create a Smart Album and specify criteria for it using the Smart Album’s Smart Settings
HUD.
2 Click in the Browser, then press Command-A to select all the images.
3 Control-click one of the selected images, then choose Update Previews from the shortcut
menu.
Note: Previews for Smart Albums are not automatically maintained—automatic preview
maintenance is a project-level setting only. In this workflow, you need to update the
previews yourself periodically, by following the steps in Controlling Previews with Shortcut
Menus. Aperture builds previews only for the versions that have changed, so you don’t
need to determine which ones to update.
Determining Which Versions Have Previews
There isn’t a badge indicating if a version has a preview. You can Control-click the version
and choose Update Preview from the shortcut menu to learn if a version’s preview is up
to date. (If the version’s preview is not present or needs updating, Aperture will build it
or update it.) You can also drag a single version out of the Aperture Browser and a plus
sign (+) appears over the pointer, indicating that there is a preview to drag out. If a plus
sign + does not appear over the pointer, no preview exists for the selected version.
246 Chapter 6 Displaying Images in the Viewer