Here’s a tip for all the Aperture users who have iPhones: when you find a snapshot of a friend or colleague in your photo library, take a quick second to add it to their contact card in Address Book. Then every time the person calls, you’ll be greeted with their face smiling up at you.

The quickest way to copy the photo from Aperture into Address Book is a simple drag-and-drop. When you’ve found a photo that you want to add to a contact card, do a Spotlight search for that person’s name. Choose the contact card from the Spotlight search results to open that card in Address Book. Then switch back to Aperture and drag the photo from the Browser right onto the placeholder icon next to the contact’s name in Address Book (you don’t even need to put the card into Edit mode to do this).

When you drop the photo on the placeholder icon in Address Book, the familiar crop sheet will appear, allowing you to scale and crop the image to fit in the square. As a bonus, if you’re using Leopard you’ll see that Address Book now includes the ability to apply Effects in this window. Click the Effects button and you will be able to experiment with over 40 effects, including many new effects that weren’t available from the effects palettes in Tiger (Line Overlay and Neon are particularly cool).

Next time you sync your iPhone, the updated contact information will be copied over; after that, whenever the person calls you’ll see the photo rendered in all its glory on the iPhone’s big screen.