I've uncovered some interesting behavior in Aperture related to the assignment of places. If you add a location to a photograph, and later add another location in which the “sphere of influence” overlaps other locations, then all photos assigned to those locations will now have that other new location name mixed in with their location names.
For example, add the location “Los Angeles, Los Angeles [County], California, United States” to any photograph. Then go into Manage My Places, search for “Texas”, and add that as a location. Then enlarge it's blue circle to cover the entire United States and save it. Go back to your original photograph and notice that its location is now listed as “Texas, Los Angeles, Los Angeles [County], California, United States”.
This could be a useful feature if a location's sphere was small enough, adding for example, the name of a national park or some other location name. But if you create a custom location named “Texas” and enlarged it to cover the entire state, you'd be affecting countless other photograph's location fields.
Tim,
Interesting observation. I think it’s safe to say that the engineers never intended it to be used that way though. If you want to include all of Texas, you already have something for that… “Texas”. The expandable range is for small locations such as your home. Remember slightly large areas can break pretty quickly because you can only draw a circle for the range, and not an abnormal shape. By your example, if you drew a circle big enough to include all of California, you’d have several other states in there as well.
I think it’s more of a feature. Imagine in a realistic use of it; you drop a pin on a restaurant in Time Square, then make a circle to include all of Time Square, and now your restaurant has both names in it.
@PhotoJoseph
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Yes, that was just an example - I never intended to actually do that for an area that large. I just wanted people to be aware of what was happening, in case they started to see additional location names showing up on photos. It could be because of an unrelated location entry with a circle set too large.