Scan images directly into Apple Aperture
Wouldn’t that be great? Hook up your scanner, fire up Aperture, click on Import and the images coming directly from your scanner plate? Although my scanner is shown as a source in the import dialogue you can’t import images with it directly from Aperture. But using Preview/Image Capture and Automator you can bypass this limitation. So here’s what you can do to scan directly into Aperture in 3 simple steps.

In the Image Capture scan window you can define an automatic task which will follow the scan process. It defaults to Preview meaning that the scanned image will open as a new Preview document after the scan. But we can make the images import to Aperture after the scan just with tools which are build into Mac OS X and come with every Mac (besides Aperture).
#1. Make an Automator action
To make it a bit cooler we can assign one or more keywords to our scanned images automatically. Just drag and drop the “Assign keywords to images” action and add a keyword like “Scan” or something like that. Finally we can set some usual IPTC-tags with the “Set IPTC Tags” action. In the end you should have something like this (click to zoom):
#2. Save it as a plug-in for Image Capture
#3. Scanning and have fun
Just be creative with Automator. You can set up a lot of workflows for every thinkable scanning task and you can even backup your scanned images before or after importing them to Aperture by copying them into a new burn folder or make an archive from them which also could be automatically saved to a web server and so on…
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