As the newest addition to the Inside Aperture team, one of my primary focuses will be sharing ideas about what to do with your images once you have imported them into Aperture. I’ll look at a photo workflow that revolves around getting images out of Aperture and into your other projects on your Mac. From my experience, working with Aperture users on a daily basis, most don’t realize the the types of easy workflows that this integration makes possible.

For example, Aperture’s Web Journal tool is great for laying out a website with no knowledge of HTML or CSS. But consider the photographer who is traveling abroad on a shoot and wants the ability to post sample images and entries to a blog each day. For this, iWeb really shines. To see how, first be sure you’ve run Software Update and updated both Aperture and all the iLife apps to their most recent versions. Also, if you want one-click publishing capabilities, I recommend purchasing a .Mac membership - otherwise you’ll need to deal with uploading your site to the server that your web host provides.

Now launch iWeb and create a new page based on one of the Blog themes. Add a new entry and click the Media button to bring up the iLife Media Browser. You’ll see that your entire Aperture library - including Projects and Albums - is available for drag-and-drop into iWeb. Drop an image onto the placeholder, enter your post in the text box (replacing the default text), and click Publish. That’s it… iWeb takes care of building the page and managing the back-end engine that organizes your entries. After the page is published you can visit the site. You’ll also see that iWeb builds a homepage for the blog with recent entries and an individual page for each entry. It also builds an archive page for older posts.

This Aperture/iWeb integration is made possible by the fact that Aperture generates high-quality JPEG previews of your images that are available through the iLife/iWork Media Browser and through drag-and-drop portability. You don’t even have to be running Aperture at the time. As Aperture continues to mature and competition increases from Lightroom and other third-party apps, this integration will continue to be a major benefit of Aperture.

In the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing more ideas on integrating Aperture with iLife and iWork. I’ll also look at getting images into Final Cut Studio for more advanced slideshows and DVD authoring.