From iPhoto to Aperture

Written by clinton1550 Tuesday, 06 April 2010 21:22

It used to be easy to see the difference between iPhoto and Aperture. iPhoto was the simple, consumer-oriented one that was less powerful but had a nicer interface, while Aperture was the powerful professional one that was a bit intimidating to use. So the choice was simple. Now, it's less so.

A few years ago, I downloaded the 30-day free trial of Aperture 1.0. I didn’t know much about Aperture, other than it was Apple’s own professional photo-management application and that it was supposed to be very good. I was quite happy using iPhoto but I thought I’d try Aperture, just for the fun of it.

I’m certain that I only used about ten seconds of that 30-day trial. I opened Aperture up, found the interface to be a bit daunting and promptly closed it. My intention was to sit down one weekend and really get to know the interface but I never got around to that. I let the trial expire.

Less than a year later, Apple released Aperture 2. Again, I intended to download the trial and give it a whirl — especially seeing "interface improvements" among the marquee features — but I never got around to it. When Apple released iPhoto ’09 with Faces and Places a year after that, I couldn't see a reason to bother with Aperture anymore.

Apple updated Aperture to 3.0 in February and one feature immediately caught my eye: Places. Earlier in the year, I wrote an article about what features I would like in the next version of iPhoto, and Places was one of the areas that I thought needed significant improvement. It seems that an executive at Apple read that article and decided to upsell me to Aperture.

Places in Aperture 3 solves all the problems I had with Places in iPhoto. Aperture 3’s Places has a split-screen system: photos on the bottom, Google Maps up top. Geotagging images is far from clumsy: just drag and drop a photo onto the map. You can even import GPX tracks into Aperture for display and geotagging photos.

So, with renewed interest in Aperture, I downloaded the free trial and bought the full version a week later. I’m pleased I bought Aperture 3 but it hasn’t been smooth sailing all the way.

I had a few problems just downloading the trial version. On the morning that Apple updated Aperture, I requested a trial license with my .Mac account. The license hadn’t turned up by late afternoon so I requested another, this time with my Gmail account. The Gmail license turned up immediately, the .Mac license turned up two days later — so I’m glad I didn’t wait. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who had trouble getting a license from Apple. I talked to a few people on Twitter who had the same problem.

Once I downloaded and installed Aperture 3, I imported 5000 photos from my iPhoto Library to play around with. The import took less then an hour and was pretty straightforward. I spent whatever free time I had over the next few days mucking about in Aperture. I put a slideshow together, made a book, played around with Faces and Places. It wasn’t long before I decided that I would buy a boxed copy on the weekend.

Once I had a boxed copy, the next step was to transfer my entire iPhoto Library over to Aperture. Moving 33,000 photos taking up 100GB was a monumental task — a monumental task that I’ve had to perform three times.

The first transfer was done on a 320GB FireWire 800 drive. I thought that the transfer would be faster if both my iPhoto Library and my new Aperture Library were on the same drive. So I cleared some space, moved my iPhoto Library to the drive and created an Aperture Library right along side it. All I had to do was select the “Import iPhoto Library…” option from Aperture’s File menu and leave it going overnight.

I woke up the next morning to find that the import had driven my Mac mini to the brink of insanity. First, it wouldn’t accept any mouse input — no tracking, no clicking — but the keyboard worked just fine. Then I couldn’t get any keyboard input — I couldn’t click with my mouse but I could track. A bit later on my Mac mini started accepting some keyboard commands. I lost the menu bar, the Dock sort of worked, I couldn’t switch applications — there wasn’t much that I could do.

I eventually managed to open Activity Monitor to find out what was going on. CPU usage was fine, RAM seemed to be fine but I discovered that I was rapidly running out of space on the FireWire drive, I had 3GB left and Aperture was still importing. I couldn’t get into the Finder to move files off the drive so I ended up using my PowerBook to SSH into my Mac mini and mv a heap of folders to another drive.

The emergency move worked. I freed up 30GB of space, but my Mac mini was still exhibiting some very strange behaviour.

I’d like to take a moment to praise Mac OS X for being so stable. It was running out of resources but it ploughed on, I didn’t get a Kernel Panic, nothing actually crashed and Aperture finished the import. A quick restart later and everything was back to normal.

I later found out that many other users had been reporting similar problems when importing an iPhoto Library into Aperture. Turns out that a bug in Faces was causing Aperture to hoard tons of Virtual Memory, choking OS X of resources. The bug was fixed in the Aperture 3.0.1 update which was released less than a week later.

Once the 3.0.1 update was out, I decided that I should re-import my iPhoto Library. Although the first import was a success, there were a few things missing — Aperture didn’t get to finish the final processing phase of the import. This time, I moved my iPhoto Library to a separate FireWire 800 drive and gave Aperture the entire 320GB drive all to itself. The second import went much more smoothly. It took about the same amount of time and the processing phase finished just as it should. However, Aperture got stuck on Places lookup — so when looking at photos on the map, Aperture didn’t know the names of the places.

Apple released Aperture 3.0.2 a few weeks later, which fixed a number of issues including problems that occurred while importing iPhoto Libraries. So I thought I should import my Library for a third time and, yes, third time lucky. The third import was a complete success, everything worked exactly as it should, I am satisfied with my new Library and I’m never going to do that again. As I said, it is a monumental task.

Unfortunately, my Aperture woes didn’t stop at importing photos. I also had trouble with Faces. When naming people in Faces, Aperture would interpret the letter "s" as an “m”, the letter “g” as an “o” and “t” as “p”. It took five tries to get each letter right. This bug was finally fixed in 3.0.2, so I'm glad I don't have to put up with that anymore.

But there is still one thing about Faces that needs fixing: the performance.

Faces beachballs like you wouldn't believe. I type a letter to name someone, beachball. I finish typing someone's name and hit return, beachball. I click on a photo, beachball. I try to confirm faces, beachball. Beachball, beachball, beachball. Honestly, I've never seen an Apple application perform this badly. I did a very unscientific test comparing the performance of Faces in Aperture to Faces in iPhoto. I could name the same number of faces significantly more quickly in iPhoto than I could in Aperture. I don’t know why Aperture is so slow — maybe it’s doing something extra in the background — but I’ve given up on Faces. It’s too slow to be bothered with.

I’m really pleased that I bought Aperture 3. Switching from iPhoto to Aperture was pretty rough at the start but I feel the move has been worth it. There’s a huge amount of power hidden inside Aperture, and I’ve barely scratched the surface of what it can do. There’s still a lot left to learn so I better get back to it.

Between keywords, labels, star ratings, folders, albums and Projects, I’m a little spoilt for choice as far as organisational tools in Aperture are concerned. If you have any suggestions, let me know on MacTheForum.