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Stock Control
Recently I've been selling off the remnants of a rather large collection of old Games Workshop SF & fantasy models on eBay and, of course, using Aperture as part of that process. ;-)
Being the automation fanatic that I am, this involved adding some extra custom tags in Aperture and then using an Aperture Assistant workflow to export an image for each auction in the required sizes plus assorted tab-delimited files containing the metadata I needed.
Another little helper app using some of the same code as Aperture Assistant also generates all the eBay item descriptions from those same custom tags - this had been done using Aperture Assistant as well, but I needed a bit more fine control for some of the stuff.
This has been working quite well, and some of these lead alloy models are worth a fair chunk, having been out of production for 15-20 years. In fact, the more valuable items are now effectively shop stock, with all the picking & packing issues that you have with a few dozen (or even several hundred) near-identical little grey models... My wife and I have been working around this by having each type of model in a separate ziplock bag with a label clipped to the bag, but sometimes the labelling gets complex - until the full research on a figure has been done on the various collectors sites the name isn't fixed, so you end up with a box full of bags and a bunch of labels.
Well, what does Aperture do really well? Yep, combining images and metadata. A fifteen minute trip to the book layout tools gave me an A4-format page with a series of thumbnails and associated metadata tags for the item name (and auction title) combined with the eBay category so that the models can be stored in a sensible way. Now, I just go to the same Book Album, delete the old images, add the new ones and hit 'auto-place unused images'. Then I have a series of labels ready to print containing a thumbnail of that specific model line, the eBay category and the auction title.
A little bit of lateral thinking and the problem was solved.
Ian Wood
Now if only one of these custom eBay Ad software outfits would release a version that utilizes the Aperture metadata and media database (akin to iLife), there would be a lot of new Aperture users in the eBay seller spectrum. The hardest part about selling other people's stuff and your own random bits is to keep it organized and have data (and images) to reference back to, whether it be for similar items, buyer questions, or payment disputes.
Aperture's quick database searches and built-in image editing capability are made to order for this work. Who knows, maybe we'll have an eBay layout plugin someday. Who wants one of those?