Aperture 1.0 had some pretty good web tools with nice templates, the automatic addition of metadata, Smart Web pages etc.

Aperture 2 added some snazzy .Mac galleries which look great, and the option of letting people add their own images to the galleries has some great uses, especially in education.

Unfortunately, for business use, all of this is a bit unsophisticated...

There are a number of things that the web as a communication medium excels in, including effectively instant communication, searches, state changes such as editing captions or ratings etc. Aperture’s web tools do none of these things*.

Oddly enough, that’s how I think it should be - most of these tasks are server-based and shouldn’t be the role of a local application on your computer.

This leads to a couple of different approaches - use an existing photo hosting site (Digital Railroad, SmugMug etc.) that has these kinds of tools built-in and then use the relevant export plug-in to upload stuff, or build a custom ‘bridge’ between Aperture and the CMS (Content Management System) on your website host's server.

Existing Sites

With the large number of export plug-ins available for Aperture, it’s pretty easy to find one for a particular photo hosting site. The problem is getting information back to Aperture - I don’t know enough detail about the sites to know what information they send you, but it tends to be more along the lines of what images someone wants to order than the ability to add comments. And of course there’s no off-the-shelf way of getting the information from the email or whatever into Aperture.

CMS Integration

On the face of it, this is much more promising, as a good CMS such as Drupal will let you configure your website to almost any degree. On the other hand, for the best results you need a lot of web design knowledge, a fair amount of PHP scripting etc. of a level that most photographers don’t have and don’t want to have.
Another problem is that every CMS has it’s own way of doing things - if you wrote a custom photo gallery addition for Drupal it wouldn’t work in Joomla or Wordpress etc.
Yet another problem is features - everyone has their own set of requirements for an online gallery where the client can interact with the images, whether it’s the ability to gather sets of images together like a shopping cart, checkboxes for approving specific images, being able to add comments from different people, actual shopping carts etc.

Even with the problems, I think this approach is promising but suspect that it would need to be a bespoke service for photographers rather than a standard package, with the results of client interactions saved as a text file on the server or within the CMS’s database for later retrieval by Aperture Assistant, with the information being added back into Aperture - adding extra comments, changing ratings, creating new Albums based on client choices etc.

So, if you know any web designers interested in building customised interactive photo galleries point them towards me and I’ll build the interface for getting information back into Aperture...

Ian

*The exception being the Publish for Approval system - this does a very good job of approving images, but it runs on your local computer and requires a constant net connection...