For me, one of the most exciting new features that was added in Aperture was the Preview Fingerprinting, giving the potential for some really sophisticated integration between Aperture and other applications.

Unfortunately it seems to be one of those ‘best-kept secret’ things and I’ve hardly heard anything about it since Aperture 2.0.1 came out. In fact, the first Aperture-related result in a Google search for ‘aperture fingerprint’ is one of my earlier blog posts for Inside Aperture. While ‘aperture fingerprinting’ gives Inside Aperture, Apple’s InDesign integration example, the AUN site and then posts from my own site...

I’m aware that AppleScript and integration aren’t necessarily everyone’s cup of tea, but these search results still surprised me. The ability to go from a Preview file back to the original in Aperture is incredibly powerful, either for retrieving a newer version of the Preview, grabbing metadata, moving images around in Aperture, generating a full-res TIFF etc.

Here’s a few possibilities to get your imagination going:

Interactive Galleries
Integration of fingerprinting into website CMSs (it’s just an IPTC tag, after all), allowing client orders etc. to automatically generate Albums in Aperture - for really sophisticated stuff, allow clients to add their own comments which would then be added as custom tags in Aperture. Think ‘Publish For Approval’ with bells and whistles, and hosted on your regular server rather than off your own Mac.
In theory, this could be written as a standard module for Content Management Systems such as Drupal.

Client Choices
Supplying your client with Previews, then when they make their final choices they simply drag-n-drop the files onto a droplet app that you supplied with the files, and they get a list of IDs to email to you. Drag the list from the email at your end to get a new Album containing the Versions that the Previews came from - no endless fiddling around with file names, unique codes etc.

Layout Integration
Selecting an image in Keynote or Pages and hitting a menu to automatically reveal the image in Aperture, or add a text box containing the relevant metadata, update with a new Preview etc.
Add in the potential for creating rough layouts from Light Tables and having them re-created to scale in Pages (a feature that didn’t quite make it into the new release of Aperture Assistant) and you’d see a level of integration that simply wouldn’t be possible with most other DAM apps.
Mind you, going from Pages or Keynote to Aperture would require new AppleScript commands in Keynote & Pages as they don’t give scripters access to the file paths of embedded images. :-(

Ian

P.S GPS2Aperture Lite is finally out of beta, and in less than a day made it’s way up to the most popular Aperture download over on Apple. ;-)