By: Erik Vlietinck
Thu, September 20, 2007 - 6:29:01

In iWork ‘08 applications you can open a Media Inspector, as you could in iWork ‘06. Different in iWork ‘08, however, is that --if you have a copy of Aperture on your system-- you will also be given access to the Aperture library on your disk. It may happen that you can’t see all your Aperture photos and images. If you’re wondering why that is, I just found out, so read on.

As you may know, Aperture allows you to turn on or off preview creation at import time. Generating thumbnails can take a long time with Aperture, even on a fast computer like a Mac Pro, simply because the thumbnails Aperture creates are high-quality previews. These previews can be used under different circumstances, and will show you how the image looks, even when the original isn’t available on your system.

Aperture Previews

If you turn off Preview creation in the Aperture Preferences when there are images already imported previously, the existing high-quality thumbnails remain in the library, but new projects that you create won’t have these high-quality thumbnails created. When you turn the Preference back to On, the projects that did not have thumbnails created won’t have them created unless you explicitly tell Aperture to make them.

Now here’s the catch: when you open the Media Browser in Keynote and you have projects with and without high-quality thumbnails, you will end up with projects in the Media Browser that appear to have no images inside them. There is also no way to select the images that you know are there. My first reaction was that the Aperture library must be corrupt, but that was not the case.

My second thought was that PNG files weren’t supported in the Media Browser, although they showed up just fine in Aperture by itself. In the end, it turned out to be the absence of high-quality thumbnail images that was causing some projects to be empty in the Media Browser of any iWork ‘08 application.

When I explicitly created these thumbnails in Aperture, the iWork ‘08 Media Browser immediately showed me the images in the project. You can force Aperture to create high-quality previews by selecting “Maintain Previews” as shown in the one screenshot that goes with this tip.