I Shot a Lot

If you operate anything like me, then it’s likely that you’ve got a massive amount of duplicate images tucked away in your photo library.  Through benign actions, technical ineptitude, or simple hoarding, it’s actually quite easy to amass a huge amount of unnecessary files in your image library.  While Aperture is superb at managing a library, it somehow lacks any internal method to identify and root out these doppelganger images.

My desire to nuke these duplicate images lead me to Duplicate Annihilator from Bratoo Software.  Finding no software reviews on the interwebs, I decided to take a plunge in and see if it could help my workflow.

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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.

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At this point, I’ve lost track of how many hours I’ve spent trying to get the face recognition built into Aperture 3 to work.  I realized something today, that the software has not asked in days if it had correctly identified a person.  Sure, it went and found a bunch of faces and although I’ve now tagged thousands and thousands of pictures, it doesn’t seem to have any functionality to actually learn what those people look like.

Let me say without reservations that I fully regret investing time and money in this software.

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After a few days of struggling with Aperture 3, I’ve come to discover some more of the quirks in the program.  For me, one of the most vexing quriks is the general functionality of the “Faces” feature.

For those who haven’t tried out a demo or used iPhoto ’09 or Google’s Picasa, “Faces” is a facial recognition feature designed to find and identify all the people in your photographs.  The idea is that Ap3 will search your shots and find faces first, then ask you to identify the faces it has found.  After a face has been identified enough times, Ap3 will start to identify a given person in all your pictures and ask you for confirmation.

At least…that’s the way it’s supposed to work. 

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Just as I finished bitching about Aperture 3, Apple released an update yesterday.  First, I’ll post the published fixes and then my impressions:

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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.

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