A Video Editing and Photography Blog

Over the past 10 years, I have been using digital cameras and have accumulated well over 100,000 photographs (and I’m a video editor!).  The photos have been managed with folders, several versions of iPhoto, and most recently Picassa – not the web gallery.  Over time I became pretty disorganized with many duplicates, wasted ram and slow viewing in iPhoto due to “Faces”.  So – I finally upgraded, I purchased Aperture 3 from the app store for $80 and can’t be happier this morning.

After doing all of these sub-par workflows in the past, I figured there might be some other late bloomers (like me) to the world of Aperture 3.  Here is why I love it.

1. It can handle all of my 100k+ photos without slowing down much at all (probably because I can disable faces and locations, unlike in iPhoto).
2. It has 2 built in backup methods.  One on import, duplicating photos to a drive of your choosing.  Another in a vault, which is basically a time machine specifically for your Aperture library – LOVE IT!  I am now a self-declared backup junkie.
3. Processes and works with RAW photographs very easily, the same as jpegs (just a tad slower).
4. Stacks!  It uses a system called stacks to compare 2 images and pick the best one from a series.  Many times I’ll shot 10 shots of my son, just to get one.  This is a great way to pick the best select.
5. Adjustment Tools.  Aperture 3‘s adjustment tools are all I would ever want to make non-destructive edits to my photographs.  I have been using Photoshop for about a decade and the tools Aperture borrows from Photoshop are the only one’s I ever use for photo work.  The huge bonus here is it saves your hard drive space by just making small text file indicators that reference the main image to make the versions.  Shortly put – you could make 10 versions of a single photo and it not take up more than a few kilobytes!  Awesome!