3.3

Chapter 5 Displaying Photos in the Viewer 118
If you encounter performance issues, you can check the Activity window to see if Aperture is
doing work in the background (choose Window > Show Activity). If you think that preview
processing may be degrading performance, you can turn o automatic preview maintenance
for that project and cancel the preview processing task underway. You can then generate the
previews at a more convenient time.
Determining Which Versions Have Previews
There isn’t a badge indicating if a version has a preview. You can choose Photos > Update Preview
from the shortcut menu to learn if a version’s preview is up to date. (If the version’s preview is not
present or needs updating, Aperture will build it or update it.) You can also drag a single version
out of the Aperture Browser and a plus sign (+) appears over the pointer, indicating that there is a
preview to drag out. If a plus sign does not appear, no preview exists for the selected version.
When a version has a preview built for it, you can drag the photos directly from the Browser to
any application that accepts JPEG les, including the Finder, Mail, and most other applications. If
the version doesn’t have a preview, dragging and dropping is disabled for that version (except
within Aperture). If you are dragging multiple photos, but only some of them have previews, only
the versions with previews are dragged out.
Integration with iLife and iWork
You can use previews to distribute your Aperture photos in movies, on the web, on DVDs, in
slideshows, and in podcasts. You can also download your Aperture photos to devices such as
iPod, import your Aperture photos into iPhoto, or use them to create Pages documents. The
Media Browsers in the iLife and iWork applications support browsing Aperture libraries. For each
version in the library, Aperture provides two JPEG les to iLife and iWork: a 240-pixel (longest
dimension) JPEG thumbnail that is shown in the Media Browser, and the JPEG preview image (at
whatever size you specied for it). If a version has no preview, the photo is not made available to
the Media Browser.
Note: When photos are within stacks, only stack picks and album picks are shared. If you want
iLife to have access to a photo in a stack and it’s not the pick, you need to extract it from the
stack or make it the pick.
Like photos in iPhoto libraries, photos in Aperture libraries can be used for your screen saver,
desktop picture, and Mail, through the same mechanism the Media Browser uses.
Displaying Oine Referenced Images
When an original is oine or cannot be found, Aperture draws the thumbnail image rst, and
then the preview if it is present. Because the preview is high quality, you can zoom and even use
the Loupe.
Suppressing Preview Generation
When Aperture opens, it begins updating previews for those projects whose Maintain Previews
For Project setting is turned on. (For more information about maintaining previews, see
Controlling Previews with the Library Action Pop-Up Menu on page 116 .) This can cause problems
if a project contains damaged les or images in unsupported le formats. You can suppress
preview generation when opening Aperture, allowing you to more easily identify the damaged
image les. To do this, press the Shift key while opening Aperture. You can also cancel the current
preview maintenance operation using the Activity window.