Photo Management
In the wake of the iPhoto announcement, especially its shiny new features and (in my mind) much more appealing interface, I thought I would take another look at Aperture.
This really does make sense: I work with professional creative types, and they convinced me that I ought to be using Aperture over iPhoto. I had some money to burn that month, so I picked up a copy - and watched it kill my MacBook Pro. I was shocked - CPU usage through the roof, free memory gone, every other app - including my desktop pager - stalled if not dead outright - it was ridiculous. Here I am, running what Apple is billing as its top-of-the-line for portable graphics professionals, with plenty of RAM and processor to burn, and this supposedly-crucial app won’t really work. (Although my code compiles like lightning, I will grant.) As if that weren’t enough, Aperture insists that some of my rolls were taken years before they were - as much as three years - and won’t seem to let me change that.
Disgusted with the interminably-whirling blue ball of not-really-progress, I switched back to iPhoto, and started doing even the most minor retouching in Photoshop. Now, though, I would rather use an app I’ve already bought than fork over still more for iLife ‘08. I’m sure there are reasons for and against any of the big options, but I don’t know enough about any of them, really, to tell.
What do you think, and what do you use? iPhoto? Aperture? Something else, like Lightroom? Favor me (and the other photo newbies around here) with your wisdom in the comments.
#1 Thomas Krajacic says:You might want to give Adobe Lightroom a try.
Its really speedy and gives you plenty of options to correct your photos.
I use it on my MacBook Pro.
#2 Robert Saunders says:I also use Adobe Lightroom on a MacBook Pro and have no complaints at all.
In the past I have used Photoshop Bridge (CS2 & CS3), Shoebox, and iPhoto for photo management. Lightroom has been by far the best in my experience.
#3 Blaze says:Lightroom is a great app, but it’s pretty slow on my 2Ghz/1GB Macbook.
#4 Ben Drucker says:I’m an Aperture man.
#5 Marco says:I actually use Finder + Spotlight for my photo organizing tasks.
I *do* use iPhoto (now 6, but I’ve ordered 08) for my finished images (web and print). The raw images are just finder+spotlight and for processing bibble.
I’ve created a few folder actions that import images dropped into certain folders into iPhoto.
I’m now using Flickr for my webimages, but the dotmac gallery looks very nice, I might even switch over to that since I have my webimages in iphoto anyway.
so, in short:
- organization: Finder and Spotlight
- raw editor: Bibble Pro
- finished images (web, print): Iphoto
#6 Marco says:woops, forgot to mention, I have Aperture as well, but find it pretty sluggish.. and it doesn’t support my E400 camera.. well OSX doesn’t support it, I should say.
#7 marie boyer says:I use and love Aperture. Bummer that it does not run on your MacBook Pro. Apple ought to help you with that. Lots of folks use it on their MacBook Pros with success. Wonder what the problem is?
I can assure you that, if you could get it up and running, it would make your heart swell! Fantastic program. I will never switch to anything else. I hardly have to use CS3 for anything except the fun stuff.
#8 Twist says:Unfortunately I haven’t gotten to do more than play with Aperture at the Apple Store (and it had about the same effect on the G5 as it had on your MBP) but from what I have scene it will never replace Photoshop in a pro photographers workflow.
I have checked out Lightroom and it is decent but it is slow. The thing I like about it is that it puts almost every single piece of my standard workflow of things I do to every single photo I take into a single application (I batch process all my Canon RAW files into DNG and then export JPEG’s, I also like to create custom Finder icons for all the files but Lightroom doesn’t handle that). Problem is it does it in twice the amount of time as my previous solution.
My favorite solution has got to be the application formerly known as iView MediaPro, Microsoft Expression Media. So far Microsoft was failed to ruin it. It is tons faster than Lightroom and much more flexible than iPhoto or Aperture. It is really nice for making catalogs of images backed up on DVD’s. It can also handle more than just image files. It is great for previewing fonts without having to actually install the fonts.
#9 Jasper says:it’s actually quite funny to see this - I got an MBP at the weekend and I’ve been reassessing my photo cataloguing. I use lightroom for RAW processing, as Aperture used to cripple my Powerbook, but it’s still way too hungry to have it running all the time, or to open to show photos to people, so I’ve devised a new way of doing things that seems to suit me quite nicely.
What I do now is import all photos from my camera to lightroom, process them and export the highest quality jpegs I can, then import those to iPhoto, so I’ve only ever got my best photos in there. So far it seems to be going well, as I don’t really see iPhoto as much of an alternative to Lightroom as far as development is concerned. I’d say iPhoto is to photos what iTunes is to music - it’s just somewhere to keep it all together.
#10 simon says:Lightroom.
#11 Alexis says:How much RAM do you have? I’m running Aperture quite happily on a MacBook (not Pro) with 2GB RAM. It chews through CPU initially to create previews but seems quite well-behaved after that.
#12 Seth Rubenstein says:I use both. Aperture for my work, I put all my clients photos there and do what I need to in there. I then use iPhoto for my personal photos. I have heard alot of people have trouble with Aperture, suprisingly on my 1st gen MacBook with 1gb of ram and a 120gb drive I havent had much problem with Aperture.
#13 Horst Gutmann says:Lightroom because I only have a Powerbook G4 12″
But the new featureset of iPhoto’08 look veeeery interesting since my main reason for getting Lightroom in the first place was because I could non-destructively (is this even a word?) edit my photos.
#14 Andrew says:I LOVE Aperture… I’m sorry it didn’t work for you. I use it on my 17″ Core Duo MBPro every day. It has had a profound effect on the way I work with images.
BTW, if you want to sell your license (if you haven’t already), shoot me an email.
#15 Honza says:I went with Lightroom because it runs acceptably on my G4 mini @1.67ghz. You could not prise it from my cold dead hands.
#16 Rich says:To be honest, I’ve had the exact same experience as the original poster. I have about 10,000 photos. It’s almost unuseable on my six month old Macbook Pro (with 2gb of RAM). I love the apps functionality, but the performance is so abysmal I’m at a loss…
#17 bv says:Aperture kicks total butt. IMHO
peace.
bv.
#18 Christian says:I use iPhoto.
i have around 28000 (46 GB) photos from 10 years of digital photographing.
Importing into iPhoto was a real pain it took hours (probably same as Aperture).
Because i am a sceptiv person i kept all photos in an external folder structure (as in former days on my pc) to make leaving iPhoto easy…
We will see how iLife ‘08 will behave.
I’d be happy to use your aperture licences on my MBP though!
Before you throw it into the trashcan - just email me the serial! :-))
#19 Richard Lomas says:I have a 2.4ghz MBP, 4GB RAM, 160GB 7200 Drive….I’ve been using Aperture for a while and yes it runs, but just “ok”. I’m constantly working with huge image files from my Canon 5D and a Sony A100 DSLR and it just isn’t snappy enough to allow you to be creative and want to “try things”. It forces you to really think “do I want to adjust that slider” before doing it, as you know you’re in for a session with the beach ball which just drives me crazy. Lightroom runs way faster than Aperture on my system with my pro size photo files.
#20 Jessica Beck says:Lightroom rocks my socks off. I tried Aperture but found it to be ponderous, badly laid out and hard to use. I’d try Lightroom if I were you.
#21 Alex says:I’am using Lightroom on my last generation PowerBook G4 for my RAW workflow. I think that iPhoto is not bad, but not really an option if you are using RAW Image, because you can do a lot more corrections and adjustments to your images in Lightroom. OK, Lightroom is not very fast on my PowerBook, but it feels much faster than Aperture.
#22 Richard Lomas says:I forget…Does Lightroom have any built in print ordering?
#23 Preston says:I used to use aperture on my Powerbook G4 and it worked alright… it was slow. But I was running the bare minimum of what the requirements were. I chose iPhoto at the time over it, but then I upgraded to the Mac Pro and it’s definitely better than iPhoto now. You just need a computer that can handle it.
#24 onemorepicture. says:One application that hasn’t been mentioned is Iview Media. (not the new microsoft version) but this is a serious good application for organsing and sorting. I then select a picture and it imports into Photoshop for editing. I have used Aperture but never liked the idea I had to import all my images into one ‘archive’ and not keep them in my already organised folders.
I have also tried Lightroom and just found it a little too slow - Iview is fast and allows different Libraries for different aspects of your photography or keep all the images into one folder.
#25 blafusel says:I am using Adobe Lightroom. I tried Aperture, but couldn’t get used to the way it wants you to work. Lightroom just felt more old school and fit my style of working much better. Hotkeys are also very logical (well, most of them anyways). To pick them up in Aperture seemed more complicated to me. However, for all the plug-ins, like flickr and SlideShowPro I’m jumping back and forth between Lightroom and iPhoto. Other than for the plugins support I’m not using iPhoto at all - but for that, it works like a charm.
#26 Ryan Stone says:I’m a lightroom guy too. I would love to say I like Aperture better but I don’t. I used iPhoto for my photo sorting (I only using Lightroom for RAW) and recently just switched to using the finder. I found that no matter what sorting it myself was always the easiest way to find it.
#27 paulo says:Use Lightroom. I use it on a first gen 2ghz Macbook w/ 1gb RAM and it’s super fast. I tried Aperture, and it slowed my system down way too much.
#28 Philip from Australia says:I don’t undertsand why you didn’t download the free trial from Apple. It’s fully functional. Only lasts 30 days. But at least you wouldn’t then be out the money.
I tried it on an original MBP, with 2 Gig. Yes, it slowed up other things on the initial import of my iPhoto library (thumbnail and previews generation). But now it seems ok (I don’t normally import that many at a time now).
I love it now. There are a couple of issues. But nothing really show stopping. Although I probably should have tried LightRoom.
Philip
#29 Joe Kunin says:Im running an iBook with 1gb of RAM, and while aperture ran decently (oddly enough) i wasnt a fan of the interface, and being a photographer, iPhoto didnt offer me enough flexibility. Enter Lightroom. Its quick, efficient, has every feature i need, and is a joy to use. Ive since gone back to aperture , to give it a shot, and regardless of which app i use (iview media pro was also tried), i always come back to lightroom. seamless integration with photoshop, excellent editing and library capability, and run beautifully on an old iBook
(the link is to my photography site (which is in the process of being updated with more material!) if you should so care to venture a look)
#30 solefald says:aperture works great for me. however, initial startup and importing everything from iPhoto took about 3 hours, high CPU usage and crazy disk I/O.
try it again, and let it do what it is supposed to. after that it will work great.
#31 Billy Halsey says:I’ve found that Lightroom is much user-friendlier (and less of a processor hog) than Aperture, more lightweight than Photoshop, and more powerful than iPhoto. I recently ran a set of wedding photos through both Photoshop and Lightroom (in RAW format) and I was surprised that Lightroom’s workflow was easier, faster, and produced better results.
I haven’t tried RAW in Aperture, and I don’t plan to. Like you, I find that it kills my MBP — even if I don’t import anything from iPhoto. And, well, let’s not even mention iPhoto’s RAW support.
I did purchase iLife ‘08 yesterday, though, and I’m liking it a lot.
#32 Tod says:All these comments are extremely interesting. I’m in the middle of trialing Aperture and I haven’t noticed any of the sluggishness encountered by others. My system is a 1.82 Mac Mini connected to a 23″ Cinema Display. Note however, that rather than run off the slower internal HDD I boot and have all my applications on an external FW drive running 7200RPM. The mini has 2Gb installed. I usually have a half-dozen or so applications open at the same time though none should be trying to grab the processor (Mail, Preview, textEdit, Safari, etc).
I haven’t tried Lightroom so I can’t comment on the differences.
I also recently purchased something called Light Zone, which isn’t in the same category as Light Room or Aperture but it is a great app for doing color correction and other editing. Too bad i just picked it up and now it looks like iPhoto will do much of what LZ does
I also subscribe to a service called Phanfare where I can upload photos to their servers, create web albums, etc. The lifetime membership is $250, quite reasonable for an offsite storage of my tens of thousands of digitized 35mm slides and negs as well as eight years’ worth of digital photos.
-Tod
#33 Scott says:I am using Aperture very happily on my MBP. I used it for almost 2 years on PowerBook…it was sluggish, but I stuck it out. The switch to a MBP was night and day for me. The program just smokes through thousands of Nikon D2X RAW files! To be fair, though, Lightroom did seem to run faster on my PowerBook than Aperture did.
A quick note for those who are still comparing Aperture and/or Lightroom to Photoshop: They aren’t the same thing. They (Aperture or Lightroom) were never intended to replace Photoshop. Photoshop still is, and probably will continue to be for the forseeable future, an important part of a professional photographer’s workflow. That being said, I had never really considered the idea of using iPhoto for my fun snapshots and using Aperture for my professional work. I think I’ll give that a try…I’m excited about the new features in iLife ‘08!
#34 Padriac says:I use Aperture on a similar system to yours: whatever is happening isn’t right or is temporary. Admittedly, Aperture is a resource hog but I find it plenty snappy and usable. Lightroom is a good choice too, but you definitely are getting an improper Aperture experience.
#35 Ramón says:Aperture was initially sluggish but Apple has made considerable improvements. I found the loop tool to be the main obstacle.
I have over 50K photos on an external hardrive - I don’t store any of them on my computer’s internal hardrive.
I only shoot RAW; do a first edit of my CF cards with Preview; create a folder and move it to the external hardrive. I open Aperture and import the pics.
From the very beginning, Apple emphasized that Aperture was not meant to compete with PS. I don’t know why people insist on comparing the two. If anything, Aperture picks up where iPhoto stops.
Ultimately, I crop many photos (action shots) - I use a full-frame Canon 5D. Making adjustments on a reduced file version reduces the potential for processor lag.
#36 Paul says:Aperture does “preview processing” on all files that it imports. By default, these previews are full sized. If you go into the preferences menu, you can change it to something more reasonable (like “fit within 1200×1600″) and you can also disable automatic preview generation for projects. The previews are awesome for making aperture work seemlessly with other apple apps, but there’s no need to be doing lots of preview generation in the background when you’re trying to work interactively. When you go home, leave the laptop on and manually tell it to go back and update all the previews while you’re sleeping.
#37 Will says:Photo Mechanic is by far the most popular in Photojournalism industry, mainly just because it’s fast. I’m personally not a fan but it’s what most of my friends used. I did too, for a while but it doesnt really have a long-term workflow feel to it.
I love the concept of Aperture, I like how it handles my file organization and allows me to work. But I too am on a MBP, 2gb of ram with 2.16Ghz, and while its rendering thumbs and previews, I might as well leave the room and go make some food, cause the computer is useless during this process. Also, it consumes a mass amount of file space, the library alone with a few weeks of my work was around 2gb, which is insane for me to want on my portable computer.
It does run fine, not great, once the previews and thumbs have been generated though. However, being on a laptop, I need to move off to another drive fairly quick, I mac out the 100gb of HD space each month, and Apertures ability to handle this easily is piss poor.
@Twist Aperture is in no way meant to replace photoshop. Nor is any other photo managing application, that is a battle no one can win.
I haven’t tried lightroom as of yet, not since the first beta, and I hated it then. Looks like its grown up a lot though.
#38 Dan Ridley says:I adore Aperture, but second what others have said: leave it open and let it sit for a while generating previews and whatnot. Give it about a half-hour per 5000 photos. Once it’s done, you’ll be happier.
It ran acceptably on my 1st-gen non-Pro MacBook 1.86 with 2 GB RAM, and it “scrolls like butter” on my iMac Core 2 Duo 2.16 with 3 GB RAM; your Pro is closer to the latter, with its dedicated video card.
The Aperture feature for moving high-res source photos off to an external drive while keeping low-res JPEGs to play with is fabulous. In addition to digicam shots, I am managing a bunch of 10MB+ 600dpi scanned photos going back to the 1950s. My Aperture Library is something like 750 MB on my local drive, and there are many gigs of photos on the external drive (which I mirror to Amazon S3 for backup).
My only complaint with Aperture — and it’s a doozie — is that I can’t modify the time of photos. There’s a third-party app (Timeature, http://www.tow.com/timeature), which pretty much does the job, but it’s slow and doesn’t exactly fit into the otherwise ninja-like Aperture workflow. Here’s hoping Aperture 2 learns some of iPhoto 08’s tricks.
#39 Vasil Vangelovski says:So true, Apperture is a resources pig. It also acts really weird when constructing it’s library. For me it’s Adobe Lightroom and nothing else.
#40 Paul says:I use Aperture on my MBP 1.83 core duo with 2gb ram and dont have any huge issues. Performance can be a bit naff when generating previews, but apart from that I love it. I just got a 20″ Cinema Display to use with it too and it rocks.
Tried Lightroom, but it just felt kinda restrictive in the way the modules work. Aperture has a much more open approach to workflow.
Remember, this is still a fairly new piece of software, I expect version 2 will address most people’s complaints and add a bunch of cool new features - something to look forward to!
#41 Nik says:Depends on what you want to do. If you want to manage photos, forget Aperture (caps out at 15k pictures) and forget Lightroom (had no problem importing 72k pictures, but took 32 hours, and opening a picture took about 20 minutes on a recent MBP). I hope iPhoto ‘08 with events can handle this with more style, but I have my doubts. iPhoto ‘06 could not.