It was borked on release, patched, patched again, and then again.  The interwebs currently show 11,900 pages mentioning “Aperture 3 problems”.  I became incredibly frustrated with the whole affair and considered jumping ship to Lightroom 3 beta in hopes of better stability.  It’s now two months later and time to examine the state of my Aperture3 exploration.

While my adventures in Aperture 3 were torturous at times, the upgrade to Ap3 and Snow Leopard did force me to adopt a sensible backup strategy I’d lacked before.  I set up an external time machine, and I managed to consolidate my files and organize my data in an effort to slim down my boot disk.

After consolidating all stray images on my hard disk into the aperture library, I moved the entire library to a secondary disk in my mac tower.  I figured the library should probably reside on a secondary disk both for space and performance considerations, and after moving the library I realized that it was already consuming 130 gigs of space.

My library is now on a separate drive and I’ve recovered about 200 gigs of free space on my boot disk.  From a baseline, this is a pretty decent environment for photo editing/organization, but how is Aperture working for me?

The bad first…

I can say that the vast majority of stability and performance issues were cured with the second and third updates.  The endless hanging and beach ball spins were eradicated with these patches, which also re-enforced by belief that it was a shoddy first release and not a lack of RAM on my part that was leading to such poor performance.  That being said, even after the patches and drive work I’ve performed, the program is still noticeably slow.

I’m not talking about switching between project folders, or waiting for faces to cache, or applying brushed selective focus atop 19 other adjustments…I wouldn’t be surprised at any sluggishness in those operations, what I’m talking about is a noticeable delay in something as simple as the drop down file menus.

Places and faces both cause a good hang upon loading, but most annoying is the delay between the time the “loop” icon is pressed and the time it actually appears.

I don’t believe these issues are related to system horsepower, but instead are likely to be a result of the actual program.  My suspicion is that there might still be some performance gains to come from 64bit optimizations, so I’ll continue to judge aperture as a work in progress.

the good…

Perhaps not due to any feature of the actual program, but instead a result of installing it, I’ve become much more organized.  When I first installed Aperture 2, I was content with importing my iPhoto library and using it’s existing structure as the default organization.  Over time, this became a bit of a pain and the daunting task of locating a given image out of 300 some generically named projects meant that I often gave up out of frustration rather then actually working on any images.

Moving to Aperture 3 provided an opportunity to reexamine my organization and begin a cleanup process that might result in a photo library that I use instead of curse at.

and a current annoyance…

Aperture is great at organization in theory, but there is one area where it is severely deficient.  In consolidating all my pictures into a single library, it somehow ballooned to almost 130 gigs and 24789 images.  Since I started with somewhere around 17 thousand, I don’t believe that I somehow found an additional 7,000 images to add to my photo library.  Instead, I’ve managed to collect numerous duplicates of images from all corners of my hard disk.

Part of this is due to the way in which Aperture imports images from iPhoto.  When using the import utility, Aperture will gladly mine every image from your existing iPhoto library, however contrary to common sense, the iPhoto library will remain untouched even after you import them into aperture, resulting in a copy of the file in both Aperture and iPhoto.  While this may be perfect for some users, aperture gives a choice of either copying or moving images when importing from other locations…for me it seems stupid that iPhoto isn’t treated with the same options.  This difference in behavior resulted in me somehow copying my iPhoto library at least twice and perhaps more in my careless attempts at consolidation.

Which brings me back to Apertures glaring deficiency.  Aperture lacks any automatic method to locate duplicate images within it’s library.  Sure you can use a variety of smart album methods to discover similar EXIF data and use that to ferret out your clones, but there is no simple and reliable duplicate location function built into the platform.  Obviously there are many reasons why a person might want to retain several distinct copies of a given file, but there are many more reasons why someone would want to locate all distinct copies of a given file.  Aperture provides no real method to accomplish that task, which is one of the reasons why my library is at least 7k images fatter then it needs to be.

Searching google for a solution has lead me to Duplicate Annihilator from Brattoo Propaganda Software.  Since I’ve got this library problem and there aren’t a lot of reviews on google for this little utility, I’ve decided to give it a run for it’s money (at $7.99USD).  My next post will detail the results.