Aperture 3.5 Support

[Daniel Jalkut]

Does anybody have a sense of what is going on with iMedia and Aperture 3.5? I have gotten some feedback that it doesn’t work and upon testing with my own copy of Aperture 3.5, it appears possible or likely that the library format has changed in some ways.

In particular the libraries don’t seem to meet iMedia’s expectations because the bundle doesn’t contain a "ApertureData.xml" file. Instead, the contents of the Aperture 3.5-based library are:

drwxr-xr-x@ Aperture.aplib
drwxr-xr-x Attachments
drwxr-xr-x Database
-rw-r--r--@ Info.plist
drwxr-xr-x Masks
drwxr-xr-x Masters
drwxr-xr-x Previews
drwxr-xr-x@ Thumbnails
drwxr-xr-x iLifeShared

Since I have Aperture 3.5 installed I am willing to take a crack at fixing this if it’s not too complicated, but if somebody else is already digging into it I don’t want to duplicate the effort.

Daniel

[Houdah - Pierre Bernard]

Hi!

Aperture 3.5 does write the ApertureData.xml file here.
I even tried deleting it. It was recreated on quitting Aperture.

The preference for this seems to have been renamed. In Aperture 3.5 it is called “Share XML with other applications”.

I do however have a customer reporting the file to be out of synch with the actual library.
I am not quite sure yet what is happening exactly, but I suspect it to be triggered by deleting images in Aperture.

In HoudahGeo I already read from the Aperture database file to get the master path of images.
I guess I could just as well read everything from the database and skip the XML file.

Pierre

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[Pierre Bernard]

Apple did document the changes in behavior of ApertureData.xml: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5932

Pierre


On 01 Nov 2013, at 20:16, Daniel Jalkut <jal...@red-sweater.com> wrote:

>

[Daniel Jalkut]

Aha! So maybe it was just my naivete about needing to flip a switch in Aperture?

I guess if it seems reliable to try to read the DB directly without requiring the .xml file, it would be a boon to users to not have to figure out that there is a switch in Aperture. I guess that one nuanced improvement would be if there is no .xml file there, it could instruct the user specifically to turn on the XML sharing.

FWIW I flipped the switch and indeed, Aperture photos showed up as expected in iMedia.

Thanks for the help, and sorry for the false alarm.

Daniel

[Jörg Jacobsen]

A couple of additional considerations:

with OS X 10.9 Apple introduced the "Media Library Framework" which is now Apple's official access path to libraries like Aperture or iPhoto. Thus, I suspect the mentioned preference will eventually be removed. Apple has already indicated this when discussing temporary file system entitlements with respect to media file access.

Therefore, directly accessing the master files and the metadata database will also suffer the expected restrictions mentioned above (well, if you are targeting the App Store). Besides, Apple seems to once in a while change their internal storage for media files and metadata. We would face the same problems here as we currently do with the XML format changes.

In my view we will have to adopt the Media Library Framework API. Considerations here:

- is it stable yet? (aka is Apple using the same framework for accessing their assets from Pages and the like?)

- is it complete regarding iMedia's needs?

- if we adopt it as long as we support OS versions less than 10.9 we would have to support both access paths

Regards, Jörg.