Aperture Web Galleries
I really want to like Aperture’s web galleries. The smart web gallery feature offers almost instant sharing of photos: Import images into a new project, rate them as they appear, create a smart gallery based on the rating, select a theme and export the pages. Done! I even use the galleries on my private site. Unfortunately, beyond the convenience, Aperture’s web gallery feature is a bit of a disaster.
For starters, hands up all Aperture users who also use Safari? Your galleries probably look great to you. But for the 98.3% of web users who currently use Internet Explorer, Firefox, Camino, Opera and other popular browsers, they won’t. Why?
- Aperture uses HTML tables for page layout. Aside from the fact that this is inappropriate, web browsers are notorious for rendering tables incorrectly or inconsistently. Safari is pretty good, Firefox does a bit worse, but Internet Explorer is typically miles out. The end result is that Apple’s finely tuned page layouts immediately go out the window if you use anything other than Safari.
- Aperture uses fonts that are not available on many Windows systems, including Futura and Baskerville. As a result, the fonts that you see in the Aperture preview, or in Safari, will be replaced with something completely different for Windows users.
- Aperture does not generate valid HTML code. If you couldn’t care less about this, suffice it to say that different browsers will handle these errors differently, giving potentially different results.
Another clunky area is captions. If you want to use one caption for your stock agency, for example, and another one for your web gallery, you have to create a new version of the image, make it the album pick in your web gallery and change the caption. This works fine, except you now have an extra version to manage—so when you make a change to one version, you then have to lift and stamp that change to its siblings. It’s fine for a small number of images, but if you have web galleries containing hundreds of photos with custom captions, this becomes a major chore.
And what about metadata? Have you ever wanted to display, say, the caption, image date and object name on an image page? Or display the date in a format other than the default? Can’t be done. You have to select one of Apple's 23 metadata presets, and if they don’t float your boat, tough luck.
What’s frustrating about this—but also vaguely encouraging—is that these problems would all be easy to fix: Provide a list of available metadata fields and allow users to select which to use, on an individual basis. For captions, web journals already allow per-page captions on index pages, so it wouldn’t be a huge leap to do this for web galleries as well. And the web layout? A couple of days, tops, for a web developer to build a set of robust web page themes that would work with any browser and any operating system.
We’ll have to hope that Apple sorts these issues out for the next version. But in the meantime, you could always have a go at customizing Aperture’s web galleries yourself.
June 2, 2007 #