ChrisStreeter
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Facebook Exporter for Aperture

November 25, 2010 —

I've wanted to recently upload some of my pictures to Facebook. However, there are several things I really dislike about Aperture's built-in Facebook syncing.

First, order is not preserved. I want pictures ordered in a predicable way. Often, by date. I have yet to figure out how Aperture chooses to export, it seems to be quite random and is infuriating.

Second, tagging friends on Facebook from the built-in Aperture Faces is spotty, at best. Sometimes it works, and other times I get lots of pictures with people's names tagged, but those names are not linked to the proper Facebook friends, despite being tagged with the exact same name. Again infuriating!

Third, making any change in Aperture (adding a tag, etc), causes the photo to be re-uploaded to Facebook, creating an updated photo album feed story. I don't want this behavior. I want to export my photos to Facebook and then choose when it should be updated again. I'll let you guess my emotion.

After finding no other solutions, I wrote my own Facebook exporter

So, what other options are there out there? Well, this guy Sean Farley created a plugin. However, it is broken on my computer. Supposedly, it does work for some people on Aperture 3, but I cannot get it to even show up in the Export menu and I get no Console messages. I've even emailed Sean twice trying to contact him and help figure out why it is broken. No response.

Finally, I've given up with these options. I'm not a prolific Facebook photo uploader, but there are times when I want to put up pictures on Facebook instead of Flickr. And I couldn't do it without exporting the photos from Aperture to my disk, and then using Facebook's photo upload.

So over the past couple weeks, I spent some time creating my own export plugin for Aperture. I don't want to completely support this project (beyond having it work for me), and so I decided to release it on github for the benefit of the community. My goal is that someone else will find the code and project useful. There are currently several limitations (documented on github) and I'm sure there are bugs, but I've got the project to a stable enough point where I can upload photos to Facebook and am happy with where I've gotten it. Check out the github page for more information on getting the plugin and using it.