Sleeping Monkey Presents...
From iPhoto to Aperture
Jul 23 2009Recently, I switched the application I use to manage my (rather large) photo library, which is fast approaching 12,000 photos. They date only as far back as 2004, though I admit that the vast majority of the photos are of a very poor quality.
I’ve had this Mac since January 2008, and I can’t actually remember what software I used to manage my photos before then. Since then, however, I used the excellent iPhoto by Apple, which came free with the installation of Leopard when I bought the Mac. iPhoto was great – it organised photos by events, it kept track of keywords easily, and when I upgraded to iPhoto ’09 earlier this year, it could even track people’s faces for me. A couple of plugins and Google Earth meant that I could also geo-tag my photos, and I even used the built-in photobook creator to build a beautifully made book for my housemate’s 21st birthday.
However, when I reached around 10,000 images, iPhoto started to lag. It would be slower than usual opening it, browsing through the photos slowed down considerably, and the final straw came when it twice corrupted my library, forcing me to restore my photos from backups I had on my external harddrive (largely thanks to Time Machine). So I thought it was time for a upgrade, time to change to a more professional (though my photography is hardly professional) application. That’s when I moved to Aperture.
Aperture is also an Apple product. I toyed with the idea of Adobe Lightroom, but as I already had an Aperture trial and license installed, it seemed to make more sense. But has Aperture actually helped?
On the speed side of things, it is much faster at managing my growing library. In fact, Apple states on the Aperture product page Now it’s even easier to … manage massive libraries
, although I am sure that many people out there have far larger libraries than I.
Workflow wise, I much prefer it’s method of handling RAW files than iPhoto – although this took some getting used to. Since I fairly recently acquired my first dSLR, shooting in RAW is common for me now. iPhoto would simply show me a preview of the RAW file, and any editing I wished to perform would have to be done in an external application – for me, this meant launching Photoshop, which is no meagre task on a machine which has a large number of applications running. Aperture, however, handles the RAW editing itself, creating a master image and a second version with your tweaks. Should I wish to edit the photo further, it also provides options to open it with Photoshop, where it opens as a .tiff, and any changes I make (and save) are updated in another version of the photo within the Aperture library, preserving the original RAW, yet linking it obviously to any edited version.
The Aperture workflow for importing images also seems much improved over iPhoto’s, although I am yet to work out how to get it to remove the photos from the camera once it has imported them. (If anyone has any knowledge of this, let me know!) Aperture manages the photos using Projects, Albums, or Smart Albums (albums based upon rating, keywords, date, EXIF data, any number of filters), and has support for creating books, organising into Light Tables, and uploading to Web Albums and Journals or Mobile Me. I don’t use Mobile Me, so have never used that feature of Aperture, but I do use an excellent free plugin for exporting my photos to Flickr.
Unlike iPhoto, Apertures projects, albums and books can be organised into folders (within folders) within the sidebar, allowing a second level of organisation. iPhoto had simply one hierarchy, a single level of events or albums, so the more intuitive Finder-like approach taken by Aperture is useful.
A decent plugin called Maperture has provided an incredibly simple and easy-to-use geo-tagging interface, which means that the only feature previously available in iPhoto that I no longer have access to is the face-recognition – although, let’s face it (get the pun?), isn’t that just a bit of a gimmick? I have yet to try the photobook functionality, but as it’s produced by Apple I presume it will offer the same features as the iPhoto version.
So they’re the main reasons I moved from iPhoto, and some of the features of Aperture that I’ve discovered and like. Don’t forget, you can see my latest photos on Flickr by using the link on the left, or the photostream at the bottom of each page of this blog.
Toni
Hi Ben,
a friend of mine from the blogosphere has recently been looking at both aperture and lightroom. He’s an apple man through and through, so eventually picked aperture because it works like a Mac, rather than Lightroom, which works like an Adobe app for Windows.
It was interesting because he found lightroom much more powerful than aperture, but couldn’t come to terms with the appearance and workflow. He’s not a professional either, but does take quite a lot of pics and is both a perfectionist and convinced the apple way is THE right way.
BTW I find your use of iPhoto interesting. It never occurred to me to use it to organise images (and I have most of mine on a PC anyway). But as a photo editor it seemed very frustrating, and I ended up using the GIMP in order to do quite basic manipulation. Maybe I should consider letting it hunt down and organise the images – assuming it will ever let me have control of them again.