A bit of a miscellany this week, and a day late to boot... :-(

Anyway, if you are dealing with a lot of metadata entry in Aperture, you'll be aware of how useful the autofill feature is, where typing into a metadata field will automagically start filling in the field with previously-used text.

Even more useful is the way that you can edit these autofill texts by going into Metadata>Edit Autofill Lists... where you will find the Version Name and all the IPTC tags listed, with the current list of recently entered text. You can add new entries in the dropdown sheet, but even more useful, you can remove them as well. This is very handy if you previously typed in something spelled wrongly, but comes before the correct spelling in the alphabet, for example "Ian Wiid" instead of "Ian Wood". It's only one letter out on the keyboard, but it means having to type six characters in before you get the right autofill, rather than 2-3 normally.

Go in and delete the mis-spelled entry and you're back to a lot less typing.

Unfortunately, Aperture gives the user no way of editing the autofill list for custom tags, and I use a LOT of custom tags - and I've not yet found out where they are stored. So for now, i just have to plough on until I've passed the twenty most recent entries in the list and the mis-spelled item drops out...

Lastly, a quick tip for moving Versions from Project to Project. A lot of newcomers grab a Version, and drag it into an Album in another Project, expecting the Version to move into the new Project. What you need to do is drag the Version into the top level of the target Project, not into any of the sub-structure.

Ian Wood