I've had a chance to play around a bit with Apple's new Aperture image-processing software. It's nice when someone releases software that makes part of your job easier, and this is certainly one of those times.

Previously, getting photos from camera to the Daily News website went like this:

1. Connect the camera to the computer
2. Copy the photos to the hard drive
3. Open each one in Photoshop and adjust color, crop and sharpening
4. Export as a jpeg
5. Open a web browser, go to my Flickr page and upload the photos.

All the way, I would worry that I'd accidentally overwrite or destroy my original image.

Aperture takes care of all of those steps for me, and does it in a way that's non-destructive. So if I decide two years down the road that I don't like the way I cropped an image, I can just recrop it.

Very cool. Now if only we could get Apple to give us a bunch of copies for the newsroom.