Aperture

I can't say that I am power photo user. Heck my main camera is my iPhone and I honestly rarely shoot with anything else anymore. You know the whole philosophy the best camera is the one you have with you. When I do want to edit pictures I use photoshop. I have been a photoshop user for 15 years now and I am comfortable and can get around in the app. That being said it is expensive! I am currently running PS3, because I have not wanted to bite the bullet for an upgrade. I have been toying around with trying out other apps for my photo processing.

My current workflow is to take pictures on the iPhone. Sync the iPhone and use iPhoto to get the pictures off the iPhone. At the end of an import iPhoto asks you if you want to delete the pictures off the iPhone. Works like a champ! My wife also has an iPhone and iPhoto is great at detecting it is a different phone and runs the whole process again.

Next I use iPhoto to organize my events. This often includes combining pictures that my wife and I took. Often we are at the same event and both taking pictures. Once they are all organized, I fire up MacDaddy and upload them to SmugMug. MacDaddy integrates spectacularly with iPhoto and makes uploading to SmugMug awesome.

Now the next time I sync my iPhone I have iTunes set to sync over my last 20 events. This way I always have our most recent photos on our phones. Again the sync works perfectly for both myself and my wife. And on the topic of Apple Kool-aid. The event sync works to our iPad. Oh and it works to our appleTV. We often listen to music through the appleTV and have the screen saver set to pull events. Turns the TV into a big fat photo album

We are happy. Photo's everywhere, nice seamless process.

Now enter the app store and the ridiculous discount they are selling Aperture for. I did a very quick research scan on Aperture. Most said it was iPhoto on steroids. Afraid the price was going to go away I pulled the trigger.

First impression, Aperture is a good photo organization tool, but it is anything but iPhoto on steroids. The entire work flow that I documented above, does not exist in Aperture. You can use Aperture to get photo's off your iPhone, but it does not delete them. This means you have go back one through one and delete them. This step alone is a deal killer for me. Apple thread on the topic. Beyond that the entire event synchronization process back to the iPhones, iPads and AppleTV are dependent on the events being in iPhoto.

SmugMug does not directly support uploading photo's from Aperture like it does iPhoto. They do link to a 3rd party plugin that will do it. Before becoming a SmugMug customer I ran my own photo site based on an opensource tool called coppermine. There was a 3rd party plugin for iPhoto, which the developer gave up on and it stopped working after an iPhoto update. Needless to say I am once bitten twice shy about 3rd party plugins.

There is an option that allows Aperture to use your iTunes library. This would require me to use iPhoto to sync the photo's off the phones. Then start Aperture to organize and edit. I have not tried it yet because I am not too keen about using 2 programs instead of one. I am also a bit hesitant to have both iPhoto and Aperture hitting the same library because I can imagine it will lead to corruption.

I was expecting an application that gave me better photo editing, organization and syncing than iPhoto. Looks like Aperture has much better editing and organization, but that it completely lacks the synchronization features of iPhoto.

Looks like I will be staying with iPhoto for my photo library for the time being.

I also received a very strong suggestion to try Picasa as a photo editor which at free I am going to give it whirl next time I need to do photo editing.