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 21^st 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.

However, there is no way that I’d be able to do project 365… I attempted it before, and it just fell flat on it’s face. Besides, the photos were poor quality, there was no thought behind them, it was more of an afterthought each day. “Ah no, forgot to do my photo for today, quick, let’s just grab anything and take it”.

So what project could I do? Any ideas? I’d like one where I have to think about each photo, and one where I can try to produce actual quality photos, rather than junk. That probably means that there would have to be no time restriction on each photo – if I have to take one each day, there’s no way I can get them all high quality, that just wouldn’t happen. Any other project ideas I could do?

Cupcakes

Portsmouth by Night

Roses

Light Trails

Christmas Decorations

Cards

If you want to leave comments about the photos, it’d be appreciated if you could leave them on the respective photo’s Flickr page. Thanks!

We got a new wireless router in our house…finally

Saturday 15th March

Moving all my stuff home for Easter.

Sunday 16th March

Spent most of Sunday coding Java…

Monday 17th March

Band rehearsal and had a play on my old old bass!

Tuesday 18th March

Baked an awesome treacle tart…

Friday 7th March

Out at Route with Dale, Paul and Rachael.

Saturday 8th March

Dale and I being stupid at the High School Musical evening at Paul’s.

Sunday 9th March

The PA at King’s Church on Sunday evening

Monday 10th March

Pool with a bunch of people – Paul’s last day before he went to Australia!

Tuesday 11th March

DVD Night at Rachael’s.

Wednesday 12th March

Taking Rachael to the airport for her flight home.

Thursday 13th March

Another lovely photo of cell…

Monday 3rd March

When the police came to take my statement…

Tuesday 4th March

Ubuntu on my laptop!!

Wednesday 5th March

Work in the Cisco lab with Jay being, well, gay…

Thursday 6th March

The lovely people I spend my cell group with!

Friday 29th February

Saturday 1st March

Saturday 2nd March