30 Days With Aperture 3

A month ago, Apple released Aperture 3. I downloaded a copy, requested a 30 day trail serial number, and took it for a spin. Aperture 3 brings a host of improvements I had been waiting for – most notably Faces and Places from iPhoto, as well as a revamped keyword/tagging system and a curves adjustment. I’m a long time Aperture user – having started using it with the initial release and kept with it through every update. From that standpoint, I can speak to the relative speed of Aperture 3. To be frank, Aperture 1.0 was glacial, especially once you loaded even a small number of images into the database (less than 5000). The 1.5 revision fixed a lot of the critical speed issues for smaller libraries, and fixed a number of bugs with the way images were handled, and the way RAW conversion was done. Aperture 2.0 was the first release to have acceptable performance for moderate sized libraries, and it can even handle my oversized library (68,000 images and counting) without too much of a problem. The biggest problem with a library of that size in Aperture 2.1 is the loading times. Even on my newly upgraded MacPro with 8GB of RAM, it takes well over 4 minutes for the application to be useable – and that is with no other applications running.

For this review, I loaded a little less than a quarter of my images into Aperture 3, about 18,000 images. I have not loaded my whole library into Aperture yet. The conversion process is non-reversible, and I am bordering on paranoid when it comes to data integrity. Once I am fully comfortable with the new version, I’ll commit myself to the rest of the upgrade. At the moment, my Aperture 2 library is over 250 GB, which represents the index files, rendered previews, keyword tagging files and other metadata repositories. Fully %90 of my image files live external to the Library as “referenced masters”, on a high speed NAS device. This is another 535 GB of data, mostly in the form of .NEFs from the camera. For the testing I’ve been doing, there is a mix of local masters on my internal hard drives, and references masters on the NAS. I will indicate which is which when relevant during the rest of this review.

Interface Changes:
There are some significant changes to the Aperture library that it took me some time to adjust to. In previous releases the viewer was pretty static, showing images either one at a time, one at a time with a film strip across the bottom with the rest of the images, or just in a grid. Everything else was added onto the sides of the viewer as requested, including the metadata editors, the keyword editors, and the project management screens. In Aperture 3, the viewer itself has different modes and until you start paying attention to how these modes interact, it can be very frustrating. For example, the Faces and the Places features now function as two additional viewer modes – much like the grid viewer and the full screen mode – so they come up focused on projects or albums, not on the library as a whole. This takes some adjusting to, as you are trying to figure out exactly which images are being processed by the Faces algorithm until you see these simply as additional modes for the viewer. I’m not sure I’m a fan of this – I don’t think there’s enough distinction between the modes, and it’s not always obvious what you are looking at.

In terms of positive interface changes, Full Screen view now takes whatever state the viewer is and expands it to fill the entire screen. In the past it took a single image (or group of images) and made you rely on the various HUDs to manage and edit the photos. This is a welcome change, as it allows you to maximize your screen real estate regardless of the task you are currently trying to perform. The old style is still available if you want it.

Additionally, the ability to do localized adjustments with brushes and the addition of a curves tool meant that I was going out to Photoshop a lot less than I used to. Out of habit, I still do final resizing and sharpening in Photoshop, but almost all of my actual editing is now done in Aperture. I do dip into Photoshop when there are complex edits to do, but that is more due to my familiarity with Photoshop, and less with lacking features in Aperture. This means the next time Adobe updates Photoshop, I’ll probably wait it out, as my copy of Photoshop can do all the things I’ve needed to do for quite some time.

Faces and Places:
One of the most anticipated features of Aperture 3 is the Face detection system that appears to have been brought over from iPhoto ‘09. It works very well, but is CPU intensive, even on a Quad processor MacPro. After running through 40 or 50 faces by hand, it starts to correctly suggest faces from the project you are looking at that it thinks match the faces you have already tagged. I’ll admit that I left it overnight to chew through my Library, so I don’t know when it finished.

Places is also very well done. In Aperture 2, GPS data was respected in EXIF headers, but it wasn’t something you could edit or assign arbitrarily. If you forgot to load your GPS data before hand, you had to locate the master files with a 3rd party program, update the EXIF data, and then tell Aperture to “Update EXIF From Master”. This is fixed in Aperture 3. GPS tagging of images can be done either with a GPS track file, or simply by taking pictures with your iPhone 3Gs occasionally as you walk around taking pictures with your other camera. Either way, Aperture associates the location data over time, and lets you assign the averages to your photos. By letting you use photos taken with your iPhone 3G, you can drastically save on battery life at the expense of precise location information. The best I can do with my iPhone 3G with a dedicated GPS tracking package is about 7 hours of active tracking, and that is only achieved by turning every network feature off and turning the brightness down as low as it will go. Allowing you to tag photos with location data based on iPhone photos is simply genius. For casual trips, or trips where you don’t move about a lot, it makes your battery last a lot longer. (Honestly, it would be better if Apple made some kind of GPS tracker that ran in the background on the iPhone, but that’s for another article at another time.)

Social Media:
Aperture is plugged into the social media world. If you use the dotMac/MobileMe service, you can publish from Aperture directly into your account. There is also support for Facebook, Smugmug and flickr, however, the flickr integration isn’t all that useful in the Emirates. The interface for creating a synchronized project is somewhat frustrating – trying to find the settings to change the resolution after the fact took some doing. This isn’t the usual Apple style, where attention to detail for the interface is obvious. Not that the Aperture interface is at all bad – it’s just lacking the polish other apps have.

Once you have the details worked out, however, it’s incredibly simple to update the online projects – just drop the images you want into the respective project folders, and Aperture will figure out the changes and send the new files. A word of warning – removing images from the synchronized library doesn’t remove them from the sites. It simply takes them out of the album you sync’ed them into. There was often extra cleanup work for me to do.

Final Verdict:
Aperture 3 is an amazing upgrade, with a few small edges left to polish. It’s feature set bring it up to a level where an external editor is less important, which is nice. The Faces and Places features keep your library better organized, and let you more quickly pinpoint a specific photo when a client asks for it. On the whole, it’s faster and feels more responsive. There are kinks to work out – some of the interface elements seem a little clunky, even after a month’s use, but these are relatively minor details that Apple can work out with point releases. It also bears mentioning that a number of trial users reported problems, although I did not see these. Perhaps it’s due to the fact that my media is already on a number of different external drives.

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