Apple Aperture 3
I tried Apple Aperture 3, reading some positive comments about it on forums. I own Apple Aperture 2 and left it in the box after trying Adobe Lightroom 2, one is slow and cumbersome, the other one fast on my MacBook Pro or even my previous MacBook Black, efficient, a real professional tool to have things done.
Aperture 3 promised to be far faster, and import speed impressed me. It impressed me until I changed the thumbnail size, and then, it was slow slow to display big thumbnails. I decided to quit and then, instead exiting immediatly, it took 1 minute to write the new library informations, for just 700 pictures!
What’s the hell? As many photographer I use to manage hundreds of thousands pictures and want to display them quick, to take decision, because selecting pictures and sorting them is a huge workload on many shoot session. At the end you have a handful of pictures that you want to process further, but it’s kinda simple and fast comparing to the select and sort process!
And a minute to exit a program? Many photographer take their Mac laptop with them to import, do a first selection or ranking and then shutdown. Aperture should quit in a matter of seconds! Not minutes!
I think Apple doesn’t get it this time, I will stay with Adobe LightRoom 2 and do a test with LightRoom 3 Beta, that may be much more efficient than Aperture 3, as is LightRoom 2! This is a workflow process. And “flow” is where we gain time, and avoid loosing money, not waiting for Aperture to complete trivial tasks!
PS: Test configuration, actual MacBook Pro 17″ 2×2.8GHz / 4GB / 500GB 7200rpm/GeForce 9600M GT 512MB. Aperture 3 is slower than LightRoom 2 on my previous MacBook Black 2×2.0Ghz with GMA 950!
PS 2: Face detection may be really useful, if Aperture 3 wasn’t consuming so much memory and being unusable during face recognition, that take a very long time, and many many manual actions to begin to work correctly. More a toy than a real production tool, as it work actually. But will be an interesting tool on Aperture 4 or 5! lol! (and again Library is totally updated! ouch!)