Aperture Applet: Show Caption On Grid View Thumbnails
About a year ago I switched from Lightroom as my Photo Viewer/Editor of choice to Apple’s Aperture. I’ve really come to love the Aperture system overall, but there are a few Lightroom tools I really wished we had in Aperture. Tanya has stuck with Lightroom and the two of us using different software programs has made things problematic now and again, so I recently suggested to her we get on the same program. Ok, room for a joke here. Yea she suggested I get on her program. One of those husband-wife things. I persevered as any good husband would not do.
Her first question was, “can I get the captions to show under each thumbnail?” Her reason for asking this is based on the system she uses in Lightroom where she can see the caption that is attached to each image running across the top of the thumbnail. The benefit of this is she can easily see which images have been captioned and those that have not been captioned. I was not sure about her request and so I reached out to an Apple acquaintance who works on the Aperture software team. Thankfully after a few back and forth emails, he got me setup and I wanted to share the procedure with you. It can really reduce the confusion level of adding captions to your images if you can see at a glance what been done and what hasn’t.
View of Lightroom with captions on the thumbnails in Grid View
The following are the images and emails correspondence from my Apple source:
Yes, it’s very easy… you can have whatever you want in there…
Metadata View option in the lower right corner of the Aperture screen
Browser & Viewer Metadata option screen
Add whatever data you need…
Select the options you want to show on the Grid Mode
Although this all seemed really straight forward I could not get the caption to appear with all the options checked properly etc. Finally after a lot of trial and error I moved the caption field from its original position in the list to the top position on the list and viola, the captions appeared on the thumbnails.
I moved the Caption field from fifth to number ONE
Not sure why, but if there are fields ahead of the field you want to show on the thumbnail, the one you want doesn’t show. I’ve requested an update to have Aperture show all the fields in line form below the thumbnails. Maybe we’ll see it in Aperture 4. You would definitely have to manage that but why not have the option.
Thanks to Martin for the help.
