Lately, I’ve been using Aperture more than ever because several recent trips I’ve gone on have left me with a ton of pictures to go organize. If it wasn’t for the fact that I’ve got 8+ years of photos and associated metadata, I would have jumped ship months ago.  I’ve tried all of Aperture’s First Aid options (accessed by holding Option-Command when opening the app): rebuilding permissions (this shouldn’t cause performance issues, but hey, I was desperate), repairing the database and finally resorting the the rebuild database option. I felt like the speed increased slightly after repairing the database and was optimistic that my problems were solved. Yet, I still had issues. I’ve been convinced that this has been a disk related as my memory and CPU are never loaded very heavily when I sit and wait for Aperture to do “stuff.” I began to think I needed a 7200 RPM disk drive instead of my 5400 RPM drive just to use Aperture.

Finally, I found an article that talked about removing the old com.apple.Aperture.plist file in ~/Library/Preferences to gain back some performance.  Today I decided to try that. But before I wiped the old .plist file, I went ahead and made a backup of it.  All I can say is, whoa. That actually worked. Aperture is actually snappy again. It’s ridiculous. I don’t even remember when I last experienced a responsive Aperture interface. Since I had a before and after .plist file, I did some diffing to figure out what was going wrong. While viewing the diff, I removed some of the options that seemed like they had no way of contributing to the slowness (things like default window locations, background colors, etc). That left me with the following diff:

1a2,3
> "" = "";
> "61-2" = "2008-08-03T19:05:02Z";
2a5,6
> "addCurrentSelectedVersions" = YES;
> "allProjectsSortMenuTag" = 1;
18a23,27
> "DotMacConfigurationDictionary" = {
> };
> "DotMacConfigurationLastUpdate" = "2010-08-17T15:44:23Z";
> "DotMacConfigurationLastURL" = "https://configuration.apple.com/configurations/internetservices/iapps/publishConfiguration08.plist";
> "ExportAttachmentsWithMastersKey" = YES;
19a29,32
> FacesEnabled = NO;
> fastBrowse = NO;
> FileHandling = 1;
> filesystemBatchSize = 10;
23c36
< projectSortingMode = 0;
---
> projectSortingMode = 1;
25a39
> fullscreenAvoid = NO;
27c41,42
< "fullscreenWhichWindow" = NO;
---
> "fullscreenWhichWindow" = YES;
> fullSizeJPEGQuality = 0.5;
35a51
> icaBatchSize = 5;
43a60
> "limitPreviewSubsample" = 1920;
46a64,67
> mainSecondaryMode = 3;
> "MetadataPresetSelectedPreset" = 0;
> "moveCurrentSelectedVersions" = NO;
> MUPhotoSize = 100;
48a70
> primaryOnly = NO;
55a78,79
> "showProjectVersionCount" = YES;
> "showUnplacedImagesOnly" = NO;
56a81,83
> subsequentLaunch = YES;
> UseEmbeddedJPEG = NO;
> ViewerPropertySet = 2;
64a92
> "WebKitEnableFullDocumentTeardown" = YES;


Immediately, there were two things that stood out to me: fastBrowse = NO and filesystemBatchSize = 10 . Seeing as I felt there was a disk issues, I decided to test out the issue. I opened the current .plist file and added in filesystemBatchSize = 10 and opened Aperture. It didn’t seem quite as slow as before, but it was noticeably slower for me. Now, I have no idea what the default filesystemBatchSize should be, but I do know that for me, removing it from the .plist file sped up Aperture considerably.  I didn’t do any objective measurements (ie. stopwatch tests), but so far, I’m not sitting waiting around hating Aperture for stealing my time.  What is the take away here? If you are having issues with Aperture’s performance, make a backup of your Aperture preferences .plist and delete the one in ~/Library/Preferences to try and get some improvement.

Enjoy!

A long drive later and I was back in Caracas combing the city for Arepas (which are really good), wedding cheese, wedding pastries and views of the city. Thursday and Friday with my mom, sister and the Hurtados went fast, but seemed to cover much more time than just the 45 hours we were all together those days.

Some things I learned:

• Weddings in Spanish aren’t as easy to understand as I thought initially.
• “Merengue is with couples and Reggaeton is sexy”
• My Spanish skills get better with alcohol and the English skills of others similarly increase with alcohol.
• Arepas are delicious any time of the day, for breakfast, for lunch, after a great wedding reception, or while walking around like a zombie in an airport at 5 in the morning.
• Apparently I can dance Salsa (or the Venezuelans were being nice and just wanted me off the dance floor)

In all, a great first part of my trip. New food, new people, new places and hanging out with my first and second family. Estoy chevere (or, in Peru, cheverenge).

So Wenzhe and I met up and drove to a place he had visited before, Alviso, CA. Alviso is on the South edge of the San Francisco Bay, situated between Moffett and Milpitas. There are a number of older buildings, some train tracks and promised to hold some interesting subjects near sunset. I ended up taking quite a few shots (180+ in total) and narrowed it down to 31 pictures that I found interesting. One of my goals this trip was to think about different ways that a scene could be cropped once the picture was taken. So I’d take a picture thinking that it might work one way, but a subset of the frame could work with a different crop. So I tried experimenting with that in mind a bit.

Check out the pictures and let me know your thoughts.

• Singapore Pictures (with a couple in Malaysia)
• Thailand Pictures

I also have the trip up on my travel page, so you can get a general idea of where I went.  You can check it out at here.