By any account, Aperture 2 was long overdue for an upgrade.  The only other “pro” application in Apple’s stable receiving less active development was Shake, a compositing program Apple has openly stopped supporting.  Most people expected Aperture to simply die on the vine like other market experiments (AppleTV), and the continued adoption of Adobe Lightroom did nothing to breath life into Aperture.  What seems at first to be a capable and professional photo librarian was quickly starting to look like one of those pet projects that no one had the heart to kill, so they simply decided to ignore it instead.

A few years back I was searching for an easy utility to complete a photobook project I was working on.  My search lead me to a free trial of Aperture,  a package I found to be surprisingly well designed and easy to use.

My initial enthusiasm was slowly tempered, as in the two years since I installed there was only been one update released.  No new features, no new improvements and worst of all…not even a hint that anyone in Apple even cared about the package.

When iPhoto’s semi-annual release added gimmicks like face recognition and integrated GPS photo mapping, I assumed that these features would quickly roll into it’s “professional” big brother, but there was still no update (free or paid).  My disappointment in Aperture’s development changed to downright frustration when I began to start playing with Google’s excellent and free Picasa on my wife’s laptop.  Seriously?  Google’s free photo software from has working face recognition?

Just when I was about to download and install the Lightroom 3 trial, Apple finally released Aperture 3!  Face recognition, yay!  GPS photomapping, yay!  Brushable adjusments, yay!  Entire codebase rewritten for native 64-bit processing, yay!

Judging by the press release, Apple released a feature-filled, high horsepower software package that can legitimately handle most photographic tasks previously owned by Photoshop’s full version.  Is Aperture 3 finally a worthwhile contender?

…that depends on if you can even get it to run.

Preface

For the purposes of comparison, I’ll baseline a few elements of my setup so my experiences with Aperture 3 can be put in context.  I start this journey with an 8-core Mac Pro tower running Leopard on a 320 GB hard drive with 2 GB of RAM.  I also have an external 500 GB firewire drive that I use with Final Cut Studio.

I shoot mostly with a now-ancient Canon 350D/Digital Rebel XT, with some additional images coming from a Nikon D70 or D200.  I’ve got a mixed library of RAW, JPG and RAW+JPG images all hovering around the 8 megapixel range.  I know I’ve got a few duplicates here and there, but my image library is sitting at a respectable 17,095 pictures.  Not too large, not too small…so I’d assume I’m a good median test case.

Speaking of mixed library, while I use Aperture 2 as my defacto librarian, I’ve been suffering under the weight of an unorganized photo library for years.  I’ve never had the time to sit down and start sorting through my photographs and thus they keep piling up in loosely organized areas according to what I’m working on at the time.  Part of my personal interest in upgrading to Aperture 3 was the potential to automate a large portion of that organization process through the implementation of face-recognition and GPS photomapping.

In preparation for upgrading to Aperture 3, I also started implementing some procedures that I should have been using all along.  Yes, I’m talking backups.  I’ve been living without them for nearly two years and that was another thing I was determined to change.

Installation

First things first – I went out and purchased snow leopard.  Honestly, I didn’t see much in the program of value to even bother obtaining the $29 upgrade, but with Aperture 3 running at 64-bit natively, I figured it might be a good time to upgrade across the board.  I also installed a 1TB drive inside the tower and partitioned it in half to serve as extra storage and backup areas during the upgrade process.

Step one was to backup my entire root drive to one of the partitions on my new backup drive.  I cloned it using CarbonCopy to have a baseline picture of my disk before I started all this work.  Next I spent an entire weekend going through my root hard disk cleaning and deleting outdated programs and unnecessary clutter. I’d been bumping against the final 20 GB of my 320GB hard drive for the past year, but with some focused cleaning, I was able to reclaim about 80 GB of space simply by finding multiple copies of the same files on my root disk.  Finally, I actually used Aperture’s Vault feature for the first time to make a legit in-software backup of my library.  I found about 8k images that were still being used as reference files, so I consolodated as part of the vaulting.

With my root disk in good shape, I made a carbon copy of it onto an external firewire drive and checked that it would be bootable.

I’d been debating for a number of hours whether to do a clean install of Snow Leopard, or to try and go the easy route and perform an upgrade.  After reading a well-reasoned post online about Apple’s OS upgrade process, I decided to just go the easy route with the understanding that my firewire backup was completely safe if I needed to perform a clean install.

I was surprised to find the snow leopard upgrade to be completely painless.  I left the computer alone for about an hour assuming that it would take a while, but when I came back to check, everything was installed, upgraded and fully functional.  What was almost as surprising was how there was almost no difference from regular leopard.  I guess I expected a few obvious tweaks, but there really isn’t much difference.

Next I decided to perform the same easy installation of Aperture.  Again, lighting fast and with a couple of clicks, it was ready to go.

Initial assessment…

As I’m telling myself how awesome this upgrading thing is, I start to realize that the process of converting my Aperture 2 library to the new software was going to take about 8 hours.  Oh, well…go do something productive I guess.  After a day of errands, my library converts just fine and aperture doesn’t crash, though in reading the forums I find that this may be an exception to the rule…

Next I decide to try and tag a few faces.  Oh…now the software has to go through all my pictures again and find the faces.  Two hours later it’s built a library of faces and random things that certainly aren’t faces.  Some are clearly identifiable people, some are patterns in walls and dresses, some are statues and some are blurred blobs of darkness in the far reaches of the night.  I tell myself that I can deal with this, it’s just a bit of sorting and the program will do the rest…this is where things start to crash.

Tag a few faces with names and…crash.  Jump from project to project and…crash.  Attempt to go full screen and…crash.

Detecting a theme here?  Something is certainly not right under the hood.  While aperture is now baked in 64-bit chewy goodness, it isn’t even half as fast as it’s older 32-bit version.  The spinwheel of death arrives at almost any alteration of any program state.  Switching between projects, tagging faces, searching geotags, adjustments, full screen…that which does not crash is painfully slow and nearly useless.

Speaking of faces…without tagging all the pictures in my library (it won’t let me yet), I can say with some reasonable certainty that I’ve got over 3k pictures of my wife.  That’s being pretty conservative.  After tagging hundreds upon hundreds of photos of her, it can’t even find her face in DUPLICATE images.  I’m not even talking about pictures that may have been taken moments apart under similar lighting conditions, I’m talking about IDENTICAL images in different projects with THE SAME FILENAME.  Even worse, I’ve now tagged the same photo a good 20 times and it refuses to save the tag.

I wish I could say something positive about the brushed alterations or the new full-screen layout, but to be honest…I haven’t gotten to use them yet.

My advise…don’t be an early adopter.  I know that .0 releases are famous for being half out of beta, but this is early adopter hell.  For a product that is hoping to take market share from the clear industry leaders, this is about as bungled a release as you could ever hope for.

If you’re interested in Aperture 3, wait a month and give the trial version a shot.  I wouldn’t lay down money until April just to ensure that the majority of the kinks are worked out.