So long iPhoto, Hello Aperture.

September 17th, 2007

Finally stepped up to Aperture yesterday. I’d been using the trial ever since we got home from Kona. Managing 1,700+ photos in iPhoto just isn’t happening anymore. The main reason for my switch to Aperture was library management. iPhoto has pretty poor library management for someone like me who has 80GBs of digital photos stored on external media.

The reason I say this is because iPhoto doesn’t have a built in method for managing photos. You basically drop some photos into iPhoto and that’s it. There is no ability to relocate them, move them to different drives, or check them out for editing locally. Aperture handles this functionality.

When I was in Kona I stored all my original files on a portable external drive then linked them to iPhoto. Problem was when I got home I moved those files from the portable drive to my main external storage. Back in iPhoto I attempted to start editing my photos. iPhoto kept throwing hundreds of errors, one for each photo, all 1,700 of them. iPhoto didn’t know what to do because the original files had been moved and it has no method of automatically relinking them.

If I were using Aperture I could have simply told it that the master files had been relocated to my external storage and it would have relinked them all automatically.

Besides the library management functionality Aperture has more adjustments and better RAW support. I’m currently not shooting in RAW but will once I get a DSLR. Aperture also never maintains more than one image file for a photo. In iPhoto you’d be creating duplicates of your images when you edit them, taking up hard drive space in the process. Aperture creates versions of your master image storing metadata for the edits instead of duplicating the image. Very handy. This is beneficial to me as well because I have a separate back up plan for my master images and now I can have my edits managed through Aperture and use it’s built in back up to store them separately.

I’ve been very happy with Aperture 1.5 so far and look forward to any upcoming releases. I’m assuming one is around the corner because I just bought the product. This usually happens to me when I buy something, soon afterwards a new version/model is announced. I’m guessing there will be some kind of update for Mac OS X.5 (Leopard) as well.

Entry Filed under: mac, photography