The customizing shortcuts feature is a powerful way to personalize and speed through your workflow and it’s easy to do.

Many of the main features and functions within Aperture already have keyboard shortcuts assigned, but you can change them to suit your own way of doing things or assign new keyboard shortcuts to actions that don’t have them.

For instance, more and more photographers are geo-tagging their images at capture, and Aperture will include this information in the metadata, as well as show you on a map if you’d like, where a particular geo-tagged image was taken.

But who has time to go all the way up to the menu bar click on “metadata” and scroll down to “show on map”--we’re busy.

You can easily create a keyboard shortcut. Under Aperture>Commands there is Customize. A powerful window opens up which lists every Aperture option in alphabetical order along with the keyboard shortcut for that action. This is the default set of keyboard shortcuts that comes with the program. To customize, you will first make a copy and change things from there, which allows you at any time to return to the default set whenever you decide.

In the top left corner you will see a pull-up menu set on ‘Default”. Scroll up and duplicate the set and give it a name, like "Steve’s Customized Shortcuts”. Now you’re ready to customize.

If you scroll down to “show on map” and then click on it, you will confirm that it has no keyboard shortcut. My first instinct is to give it a shortcut with the letter M. I then click on the M key on the keyboard and Aperture shows you all the existing M key shortcuts along with the modifiers used.

You can re-assign any keyboard shortcut or create a new one. Aha! The shift key is free with the letter M, so I simply drag “Show on Map” from the command list window over to the “shift” icon and click Save. Now, when I press Shift > M on any geo-tagged image, Aperture will launch Safari and show me on a map where that photo was taken.

It’s an extremely powerful and versatile customization option and if you spend time tailoring the keyboard commands with your workflow, you can finesse your Aperture workflow to shave time off your post processing and get back out shooting. But use customization with caution and keep a notepad handy with any changes you make. With so many ways to customize, if you don’t keep track you could create a big customized mess. The good news is, you can always return to Aperture’s default settings and start over.