Apple's Aperture photo editing software has a lot of nice features, one of the best perhaps being its ability to let you save your photo and edits to a backup device in a simple and efficient way. You define a vault for your photos, and every now and then just press a button and that's it. Everything kept safe and sound in your external backup drive.

So in an integrated Apple world you might think Aperture's vaults would hook up nicely with that other flawed masterpiece, Time Capsule. Wouldn't it be great if you could save your snaps wirelessly, without having to keep a backup drive to hand.

But no - either by accident or design - Aperture just won't let you do this, or so it seems. There is a way round this, and I can only think Apple didn't build this feature in because they didn't want people using Time Capsule as a backup device only to find that backing up 4Gb photos takes a loooong time over 802.11n wireless.

How to connect Aperture and Time Capsule
Still, if you want the convenience of wireless and don't mind leaving Aperture backing up for 30mins or so, here's how to hack a backup to Time Capsule:

1. create a new vault, and locate it wherever on your local machine. Say the desktop, for convenience. Don't update the vault with any photos yet. It just wants to be an empty vault file that you're creating.

2. open finder and double click the icon to make a connection to your Time Capsule. This should put a Time Capsule drive icon on your desktop. Double-click the icon and move your local vault file to your Time Capsule drive. I put mine in a folder called 'Aperture', which sits at the same root level as my standard Time Machine backup folder.

3. In Aperture, make sure your new vault is highlighted, and click the little tool icon below it to bring up a list of options. One of them lets you change the path to the vault. Select that and then choose the file you just put on your Time Capsule drive.

4. Now you should be ready to go! You've just fooled Aperture into thinking your new vault on Time Capsule is a local vault. If you click the little 'recycle' icon to update your vault it should start backing up. If it looks like it's crashed don't worry. Chances are it's working but just taking a long time to transmit all that stuff over wireless.

5. Every time you update your vault, you will need to reset the path to the vault on Time Capsule. The bug/feature in Aperture means it just forgets this each time you fire Aperture up.

***IMPORTANT***
Each time your want to backup to your vault, make sure you have an open connection to your Time Capsule drive FIRST. i.e. there must be an icon on your desktop for Time Capsule. This might seem crazy, but if you don't Aperture seems to go mad and just crashes. Another bug/feature?

Conclusion
Generally it's a good thing to use this feature as a secondary backup. It can take a very long time to backup this way. Maybe as much as 1hr if you have a couple of gigs to backup. Personally I use an external hard drive as a primary backup, and this method as a backup of a backup.

This is probably why Apple haven't bothered making the most of links between Time Capsule and Aperture's vaults. It's just not fast or reliable enough for most users. And as any developer knows, it's better not to offer a feature than to offer a slightly broken one.