Basic question about Apple Aperture

[Grahamfff]

I know there have been some discussions about he merits of the new Aperture upgrade.... but I have a more basic question.

 

I am about to buy a decent digital camera and would like to take the hobby more seriously.

 

In terms of Aperture's facility to store and arrange photos, does it offer significantly more than does iPhoto, which I already have?

 

And in terms of photo manipulation, does it offer significantly more/different/better facilities than the sort of software that is given away with a new scanner (often a cut down version of Photoshop?)

 

Thanks

[jezzyjj]

Aperture [or Lightroom] are very diferent beasts from Photoshop. They are designed for quickly processing a lot of images, whereas PS or PS Elements are very good at dealing with photographs individually in great detail. Though you can do Batch Actions with the Full version of PS, if you want to 'develop ' a lot of images in the same way.

 

Yes Aperture uses the same awful filling as iPhoto.

Best thing to do is organise your images properly - by date and with a description and then use the very good search functions in Aperture to find things, you cannot find by date. You need to keyword your images to best do this.

 

2008/2008-03 March/

2008-03-12 SheffieldTown Hall Demo

2008-03-15 Night out in London

2008-03-17 Museum Visit

Etc

Relying on iPhoto/Aperture's filing system is asking for trouble as you are locked into a programme that may not even exist in a few year's time.

 

And name your images as well 2008-03-12 Sheffield Town Hall Demo 001.CR2, 2008-03-12 Sheffield Town Hall Demo 002.CR2..... May seem boring to do, but you'll be so thankful later and also stops you ending up with duplicate file names.

You can batch rename files very easily in LR and also automatically include date, I've not tried this in Aperture, but it should also do it. If not shame on Apple.

 

This way of filing will survive any programme and even changes of OS. So is very good for when you want look at images in 20yrs time.

The filing done by iPhoto on the hard drive is simply awful.

I used Lightroom to sort out a friend's randomly assorted and 1000s of duplicated images that accrued from using iPhoto. LR thankfully can import and copy images to a new location and sort it all by date of capture.