I don’t use the feature very often, but when I do, it’s invaluable.

I do a fair amount of traveling - attending conferences, going to meetings of panoramic photographers etc. Being a photographer by choice, I tend to take a lot of photographs on these trips, and Aperture’s Web Journal tools are a really good way to put these images together into a documentary/travelogue.

What is a Web Journal?

Aperture’s Web journals are something in between a gallery and an extended blog post, with pages made up from three elements:

Header text boxes - text boxes formatted with larger text.

Body text boxes - more text boxes, this time with smaller text for the main body.

Image boxes - a set of images in a container.

You create text boxes by hitting the ‘+T’ button at the top of the Viewer pane, you create image boxes by dragging images from the Viewer pane onto the page.
Note that you can swap between the two types of text box by clicking the text button at the top right of the text box, and can add to existing image boxes by dragging images into the box.

First steps...

The first thing I’ll usually do is quickly skim through all the images from the trip, rating them - 1 for OK, 2 for more notable, 3 for pretty good, 4 for really good and 5 for absolutely astounding. Being fairly harsh when judging my own work, there aren’t many fives.

As an aside, there’s a photography quote I half-remember about one in ten shots being good, one in a hundred being excellent and one in a thousand being outstanding. It’s one of those cliches, but it seems to stand the test of time quite well, if just because as we get better as photographers our judgement of our own images changes as well.
If any of you can remember the original quote or the author, I’d love to hear from you...

Once the images are rated, I’ll use the Ratings slider in the search HUD to see how many images there are for each rating, then pick a rating minimum that will give me a suitable number of images for the Journal. This number is rather variable, depending on the importance of the trip and the amount of time I have available.

Second steps...

Once I’ve selected some images, I’ll make a new Web Journal Album from them. Sometimes this will be from a tweaked template, sometimes from a normal one.

Then I’ll start moving images together into logical groupings by dragging them around in the Browser pane, before dragging them into photo groups on the page.

For a good flow, I find it’s best to have about two-thirds photos and one-third text on the page, but of course that is down to personal tastes and the needs of the article/journal.

In a way, there’s not much more to say about the actual writing and construction of a journal, so here’s a bit more about the controls...

Image Controls

Move the mouse over an image on the page and you’ll see a couple of controls - the minus sign removes the image from the page (but not from the Album), while the curly arrow will show the image’s detail page, and simply clicking on the image selects that image in the Browser pane. The minus sign further to the right removes the entire picture box from the page. You can set the sizes for the thumbnails on the main pages using the controls at the top of the Viewer pane. Click on one of the detail pages and you can then set the size for all the detail page images.

Once you’re done, either export to .Mac/MobileMe, or export to the Finder and upload to the host of your choice.

For your delectation, here’s a couple I prepared earlier...

The IVRPA Conference, Berkeley
PanoTools 2007 - Lucerne

Photos copyright 2007 Ian Wood