My New Favorite Toy

The last two weeks I’ve been spending most nights playing with Apple’s Aperture 3. It’s essentially a pro version of iPhoto and a direct competitor to Adobe’s Lightroom. Aperture 3 was released in January of 2010 and has a 30 day trial period.

I’ve been frustrated with iPhoto for a long time. I have a lot of photos and they span a variety of subjects and countries and time frames. iPhoto is a decent enough program, but I don’t think it is very capable once thousands of photos are involved. I could go on and list the things that really annoyed my about iPhoto, but with Aperture 3 I’ve moved beyond iPhoto and very soon my wallet will be $199.00 lighter.

Aperture is much faster at previewing photos, even when there are thousands, and this helped me initially get my photos into appropriate folders and projects. In Aperture I’m able to manage photos using folders and projects and smart albums. I can group photos together into stacks, and reject photos that simply don’t make the cut, and the rest I can rate using simple keyboard commands. Making the whole process move extremely fast.

Once I’ve added faces, places, ratings, and groupings to my photos I can take organization to the next level by adding tags and titles and even color codes. There are a number of built in photo editing functions that allow me to adjust a photo in a myriad of different ways.

Like other photo programs, Aperture 3 uses a lot of memory. My meager 2GBs of RAM is not sufficient and my upgrade to 4GBs is already in the mail. Aperture has crashed on me several times in the few weeks, Apple recently released a patch that should help, and the additional memory will likely solve some of the problem.

Aperture 3 has fired up my OCD and it’s made me excited about photography again. It’s going to take me long time to become an expert in Aperture, but it’s straight forward enough that I already feel like I can use it.