Joseph, After watching your lesson regarding Places I became determined to clean up my library. I have several problems, which may span several emails. First: when you take a picture in a small town called, say Springfield, you may want to show exactly which spot the picture was taken. Other pictures taken in the general vicinity also get a Springfield place name. But when you go to Manage My Places and look up Springfield you get multiple entries each with the circles surrounding the photo locations. If I delete one of the Springfields I have to manually find out which photos are now lacking geotag info and redo them. On the other hand, if I try to super-impose the circles on each other to make them one big, happy circle that doesn't work either. Second, while the small localized circles have handles to re-size and move them, I often have a very large blue circle background. When I zoom out, this massive blue circle often encompasses many states. And this circle does not have handles or means to diminish or move it. Any suggestions? Thanks.
David,
Very cool. My reference to the Places is all database driven, meaning any location (which is pinned, and as you said GPS coordinates) is compared to the country/state/city/places database and if it matches a Place, it’ll get listed as such.
@PhotoJoseph
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GD,
Apologies for the delay. I’ve been swamped since returning from Europe.
Working backwards, I have no idea what that super big circle is you’re talking about, but that sounds like a big part of the problem. There shouldn’t be any all-encompassing circles like that. Can you share a screenshot? No way to post here; you’ll have to host it elsewhere and give us a link (flickr works well for that).
Overlapping circles should be avoided, however they can work just fine. Here’s what I did to test this theory, and it worked as expected.
I dropped two photos on the map in the middle of nowhere, spread apart by some distance, and assigned a place for one as Place 1 and for the other as Place 2.
I then went into Metadata > Manage my Places… and expanded the range for each of Place 1 and Place 2 so they overlapped.
I then dropped a third picture right between them, ensuring that it was in the overlap.
That picture shows a place name as Place 1. Why Place 1 and not Place 2 I don’t know, but either would be valid. Probably since Place 1 is before Place 2 in the Manage my Places list.
What’s interesting though (and what I was hoping) is that if you then have Aperture show images in Place 2 (via the bread crumbs at the top of Places, so Home > Country > State > City > Place), it will show that image that showed up in the overlapping area but was tagged as Place 1. So Aperture recognizes and shows it as part of Place 2, because it’s in Place 2, even though it’s not labeled as such. Cool.
Finally the last thing I’ll say is that remember that adding a Place name is completely optional. And Aperture has its own Places database (i.e. Eiffel Tower, Bay Bridge). If you drop an image in an area that has no “place”, such as your own back yard and you want to call this area “home”, you can add that in — but you don’t have to.
So your example of adding “Springfield” should be unnecessary. That’s a city name (unless I’m mistaken), so it should get Springfield as a city automatically.
Does that all make sense?
@PhotoJoseph
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Dear Joseph,
Thanks for addressing my questions. The big blue circle thing may be a bug. Apparently, some of my specific addresses, e.g., 123 Main St, Springfield, VA, are displayed as a multi state-sized blue blob in Manage My Places. Since they don’t have sizing handles, I simply deleted them without deleting the small, specific address point within.
After having wallowed through Places I think I now have a better way of looking at them. I agree it’s wonderful to see and find one’s places on a map. However, detailing all of my places with very specific addresses is tedious, and not as useful as I thought. You describe it as unnecessary while I would add that it’s redundant. I think my time is better spent accurately entering my keywords or captions. In other words, get the geography approximately right (when you don’t have a gps recorder) but ensure the captions/keywords are exactly right.
GD Rothenberg
Hi Joseph
I’d question whether Aperture actually labels photos with a place and also would argue for overlapping circles. Based on the way it works, I think Aperture stamps the Lat/Long into the metadata and infers where it is by finding which blue circle it fits (and as you suggest, the first match).
As for overlapping circles, I have a tiny one for Masa Restaurant inside a larger one for West End (what we in Derby call the North side of the city) inside another larger one for Derby. Searches do what you’d expect.
I can then make a doughnut-shaped selection [Place includes Derby] AND [Place does not include Home] thus removing most family snaps from the pictures of the city. Pretty cool eh?
d.
d.