It made me forget my other problems

Well I was working on my Aperture book last night and I think I finally mastered white balance. I did this using the video tutorials on the Apple website – given that I did not have a panda to work with – but Apple showed me how to do it with a wedding dress – which worked just as well.

So I tried it – using the Loupe Tool – and what a marvellous thing this is – on some of the very blue photos we took in Finland last year on the Rib Breaking Expedition.

Now I think the snow was in fact very blue but there were some other difficulties. The first was that when I fell off my dog sled I fell on to my Canon 400D and crushed it beyond all recognition. It was no longer a functioning camera.

Another was that Gwenyth had a camera that was made in 1982 and was – to be frank – not worth a pinch of pelican poo. On a good day – in broad daylight – in perfect conditions – it took bad and out of focus photos.

Our back up camera was my Sony Handycam which I did not know how to use – having barely ever used it before – and not expecting to have to use it – and not being in any condition to use it.  So Cate used it – on the video setting – and I think made 92 one second video films of Lapland.

Our photos are certainly good enough for the MOMA but not good enough to be shown anywhere else.

But anyways – while I was pottering around with this – and dead pleased I was with mastering white balance - I thought I should clean out my Aperture Trash.

Now it is a cunning feature of Aperture that when you delete a photo it does not get completely deleted – it just goes into the Aperture trash bin.

This means that if you have made a mistake you can rescue it from there by telling Aperture to put it back.

Well I had 45,000 images in the trash and it had taken me a lot of time and effort to get them there – weeks in fact – because I had had to merge my almost identical iPhoto and Aperture libraries – each of about 35,000 images – and cull the duplicates – and take out the dead and get rid of the dross - and finally I was pretty sure I was ready.

It turned out to be not as easy as I had hoped it would be - and I am not sure why.

I was idly looking at the trash before emptying it and saw the ‘restore’ button and wondered – as you do – how it worked – so I highlighted a photo and clicked ‘restore’ – and nothing happened – so I clicked it again – and nothing happened – so I did what any rational person would do and just clicked it a few more times on the basis that if clicking doesn’t work the first few times you just keep clicking until it does.

Well it didn’t - so I eventually lost interest and then did what I wanted to do which was to empty the Aperture trash.

So I clicked that and nothing happened. But my little coloured wheelie thing appeared which meant that something was happening so I just went about my business.

A little while later I noticed that a window had popped up and it said ‘restoring photos’ – and the counter was up to 15,000 odd.

Holy Shit I thought – that is no good at all – if it restores all the photos from the trash bin I will have to delete them again – that will take weeks.

But I could not stop it.

There is no Ctrl+Alt+Del in Apple and the little coloured wheelie thing was stopping me from doing  a force quit of Aperture.

By this time my ‘restoring photos’ counter was up to 97,000 and I realised that it was going to restore all of my photos for every time I had clicked the mouse button. EVERY time I had clicked the mouse button. Spare me!

I tried turning the iMac off and back on - but it just kept restoring.

So I sat there watching in great horror – like a white mouse trapped in a glass case with python as the counter reached more than 500,000.

Finally after fours hours the little coloured wheelie thing stopped spinning and I could force quit Aperture.

Fearfully I then opened it to see how many photos I had.

23,000. It was an Apple trick to make me forget about all my other silly problems. It worked.

Of course my trash bin is still full – and I am not looking forward to having to deal with that. But it is better than having to delete 477,000 photos.