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Pictures in Motion: Slideshows from your Aperture Images
Pages: 1, 2, 3
Here’s a neat trick to organize your slideshows. If you run slideshows all the time from within Aperture, and you’ve created several collections of photo images (like Projects, Folders, Albums, Web Galleries, Light Tables, Books, and Web Journals), you may want to put them all together in a single, accessible place. To do this, you first create a new Folder (File, New Folder or Shift-Command/Apple-N) and label it Slideshows. Then, go one by one to the Albums of slideshow images where the photos are currently located and create a duplicate of each Folder. After a duplicate is created, drag that duplicate into the new Slideshows Folder. The next time you need to present a Slideshow, all of your slideshows are mirrored in a single, easy to find place in Aperture under the Slideshows folder. And here's an interesting thing: If you're duplicating a Smart Album, the settings are also duplicated and it will also be automatically updated when you implement changes. You may want to consider creating a collection of Smart Albums containing your sets of slideshow images in this new Folder called Slideshows.
If you feel that Aperture’s standard slideshow features don't give you the “wow” factor or run presentations the way you want, you can resort to four other system-wide or software-based methods of presenting photographs from inside Aperture. These options are: Screensaver, iPhoto, iDVD, and yes, Keynote. This is possible because of Aperture’s tight integration with Mac OS X and other Apple software. You can easily present your collection of photographs in ways that will best suit your needs.
Let’s look into the first (and perhaps the quickest and easiest), slideshow method, your computer’s Screensaver mode. The Mac’s Screensaver is not only a tool to prevent your monitor from “burning” pixels, but it's also a great way to showcase your photos from inside Aperture.
To enable the slideshow, go to Apple (in your top, left-most menu bar), and click System Preferences. When the System Preferences dialog box pops up, click Desktop & Screen Saver, and then Screen Saver. Be warned though, just like iPhoto, if you don’t have any images in Aperture, you won’t see the list of Aperture Library images in the file pane of the dialog box.
In the Screen Saver's pane, you'll see that the photos from Aperture are organized in much the same way as within Aperture’s project panel—as Project boxes. But that’s as far as the similarity goes. The Project boxes are not in a hierarchy. The subfolders in Aperture—Albums, Smart Albums, Web Gallery, Smart Web Gallery, Light Table, Book and Web Journal—are all just individual Project boxes.
To present a slideshow, just click on the Aperture Library if you want to show everything, or click any of the specific Project boxes you want to present as the Screen Saver. Once you’ve selected a Project box, the images are shown in the Preview pane. Click the Options button and there you can choose and set your preferences to: cross-fade between slides, zoom back and forth, crop slides to fit on screen, keep slides centered, and present slides in random order. Once you’ve made your selections, click OK.
Of course, you don’t want to wait for 15 minutes to start your screen saver, I mean, your slideshow. Just press Test, and your slideshow begins. Move a mouse or hit any key, and it stops. Using this method to present your photos is a good way to jazz up your photo presentation with the Ken Burns effect. However, doing a slideshow this way doesn’t give you any other options or controls.
As an added bonus, and from the same Desktop & Screen Saver dialog box in System Preferences, you can also set any photo from your Aperture Library as your Desktop photo. You can even change the desktop photo from your Aperture Library when logging in, when waking up from sleep, or at intervals of from 5 seconds to one day per image, in sequential or random order.
iPhoto '06 was one of the most popular bundled applications included with your Mac, and one that you can use with pictures from Aperture. A lot of photographers have wondered, as I did, why the cool features of iPhoto’s slideshow weren't included in Aperture. Well, there's a good workaround.
First, in Aperture, you must go to Preferences, look for the Previews section, and check the tick box on the line that says “Share previews with iLife and iWork.” If you don’t do this, the photos from Aperture won’t be available in iPhoto.
How can you then view and get your Aperture photos into iPhoto? On the menu bar, click on iPhoto’s File, and then from the drop-down menu, click Show Aperture Library. The Aperture Photos dialog box appears. Here, you can see your entire library of photographs organized in exactly the way you see it in Aperture—Projects, Albums, Smart Albums, Web Gallery, Smart Web Gallery, Light Table, Book, and Web Journal.
Select any one of the folders with pictures that you want to show in a slideshow, and drag it into the Source panel. This imports the photos into iPhoto. If Aperture and iPhoto determine that a photo has already been imported, a Duplicate Photo dialog box appears and asks you whether you really want to import the photos, thereby creating a duplicate. There's also a tick box if you want your decision to apply to all duplicate photos about to be imported.
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