I’ve been exclusively using Aperture for about 6 months now, and absolutely love it. The non-destructive edits are liberating. The RAW support is fantastic. The workflow stuff is great. Vaults? Great. Loupe on RAW images? Perfection.
But, of course, I’ve got some gripes.
- It’s hard to copy individual photos between computers. If I have Aperture on a desktop and a laptop, and I want to copy just a handful of photos and their metadata (stars, keywords, etc…) from the desktop to the laptop, I have 2 choices:
- create a new Project to contain these selected images, then export/import it. This would make me organize my photos according to which sets I want to move between computers, with no semantics retained.
- export the Masters for the selected photos from the desktop, copy them to the laptop (USB thumbdrive, sftp, whatever…) and import them as new photos. All non-EXIF metadata is lost, and has to be manually re-entered.
But Aperture already has an “export metadata” option… Why not let me export just a selected set of photos (masters and versions) as well as their associated metadata, in a format that can be ingested into another Aperture without manual intervention or redundant/meaningless Projects used as interchange vectors?
- No keyword tag cloud. I’ve got a BUNCH of keywords, but the keyword viewer (i.e., searching) is kinda sucky for that. I want a nice tag cloud.
- Performance on my quad-G5 (with stock video card) is rather craptastic. If I disable the second display view, it’s marginally better, but it’s generally a dog on this box. It’s much faster on my MacBook Pro. I’d love it to run a bit better on the quad…
- Albums sometimes forget their designated sort order. I use a “general” project, and it’s got a couple thousand images in it by now. Half the time, it decides to ignore my “newest first” sort order and show photos in “oldest first”. It’s kind of nice, to be occasionally reminded of the first photos I shot using Aperture, but it’s not how I told the album to be sorted. One additional click of the sort triangle, followed by a 2 second wait as the 2000 photos are reordered…
I’m just ready to start playing with Aperture with the free copy we got at the NMC Conference… so this is all good to know. I thought there was some way to store your projects on an external. which might allows the movement between machines though it requires lugging a drive.
Just need some time to plunge in, but your series of comparison photos have been highly compelling!
You could put your library on an external drive, but you’d need to have it with you all the time in order to launch Aperture. What some people do is have a desktop as a “master” Aperture, and have a laptop with minimal photos. You create a new project on the laptop in the field, import the photos as needed, and export/import it back into the master Aperture library back in the office (on the desktop). You could then delete the project from the laptop to keep it nice and svelte (and use Vaults to backup the desktop so there is always 2 copies of everything).
Unfortunately (for me) that workflow doesn’t fit my needs…
I keep my primary library on a 120GB laptop drive that sits in an tiny enclosure. Bus powered, and small enough that it lives in my laptop bag.
The “desktop as master” doesn’t work for me – mostly as I don’t actually have a desktop.
I suppose I could pick up an external drive for personal use. My goal is to separate my personal library (living solely on the laptop) from the “work” library (living solely on the desktop). Occasionally, I’ll have to dump photos from a camera to the “work” library and then migrate them to the “home” library where they belong. I don’t really want to risk a portable drive while riding my bike, though…
Maybe just a “Personal” project on the “work” library, containing only the images I want to move. Export that project from work, import at home, and then move them into the “real” project at home and delete the images from work… I’ll have to play around with workflow ideas…