Do you know what Aperture is doing other than what you are doing? Most likely, not. Unless you are keeping an eye at the activity status from the Control Bar. But what if your control bar is hidden? And what if you want to know more, or even control it?

Well, good thing Aperture has an Activity feature for that.

I've always known about the Activity feature, but perhaps like most photographers using Aperture, I've never really paid much attention to it. Until last week that is, when I had to go through more than 5,000 pictures: selecting the best shots (which amounted to something like 200 plus images), batch processing adjustments and keywords, uploading actual size photos to new MobileMe galleries, creating a couple of web pages, emailing a handful of images, exporting a dozen of high-res files, uploading photos to Flickr and Facebook, and exporting library files.

That's when I realized how important and useful Activity is to anyone who is pushing Aperture to its limits.

Activity knows everything that you are doing in Aperture, even if you do not. It is a floating dialog box that shows you what Aperture is doing in the background at any particular time. As you do more new work in Aperture, Activity keeps you posted on what's going on behind the scene. It accurately provides you a continually updated status of previously unfinished commands that you've given it, even as you jump forward into other things. And perhaps, more importantly, to assess the pacing of your work, it gives you an idea not only with what's still going on, but also how much time, more or less, it will take to finish the ongoing background tasks.

In addition, Actiivity can also provide you with a certain measure of control with what's happening in Aperture, such as to pause (and perhaps to stop) certain activities. Doing so will allow you to free up certain processing resources to speed up or prioritize certain tasks in Aperture that may be more important or more urgent.

To view Activity, click on Window from the Menu Bar on top, and from the drop-down menu, choose Show Activity. Another way is to put the Activity icon in your Toolbar. Right-Click or press CTRL and click on any empty area in the Toolbar, and choose Customize Toolbar. Drag the Activity icon to the Toolbar. (At this point, you might want to also populate your empty Toolbar with other icons that provides you easy access to often-used commands.) And, you can also configure your own keyboard shortcut to bring up the Activity dialog box.

As I was subjecting Aperture through an unusually heavy workload last week for 10 straight days, I find that using Activity to give me feedback helped me to better assess, pace, control and manage the post-production work that I've been doing. This feedback mechanism provided me with remarkably valuable information that allowed me to plan and execute my work strategies and complete the jobs on time, which made my clients happy, and which made me happy.