Is anyone talking about Aperture here?

[dscott]

For whatever it's worth, I invested many hours organizing about 26,000 high res images (mostly NEFS, TIFs and some Jpegs) via the first version of Aperture on a brand new Mac Quad. Soon the app went sideways, apparently due to a corrupt file in the Aperture master library. (Couldn't name a new folder, couldn't delete a new folder, wouldn't retain ratings, crashed without warning, stalled on imports, couldn't export certain files, etc.) A subsequent Quad drive wipe and clean reinstall of the OS and Aperture and a resinstall of the Aperture library from one of two backup Aperture Vaults I created on external drives, the program was fine for about two weeks, then became unstable again. Yes, it seems the library rather than the application was at fault but it was created by Aperture and how does one find a corruption problem among 26,000 files? Actually I love some of Aperture's features but have decided to shelve it for the time being. Maybe I could get it to work on my system but I have neither the time nor confidence. I've seldom met an Apple program I didn't like and Aperture is no exception but I'm now wary of its reliability. Besides, I'm becoming convinced (partly due to Peter's "The Dam Book") that iView MediaPro more closely meets my needs. It's nice that Apple has released version 1.1 and passed on a $200 Apple store credit to us early purchasers, though...In fairness, my local Apple store business contact says lots of folks run Aperture without the problems I encountered.

[thomas]

MSBC,
The part that is locked in is the association of the informational metadata with the RAW file itself.  Sure, you can convert it to a TIFF, but that is not a good answer if you decide that Aperture is not for you, and you want to switch to a different database to manage your RAW files.

Asset managers like iView and idImager let your export the data easily with the RAW files (in several different ways) so that you CAN take it with you if you decide to leave.

This is not to say that we won't see some people writing custom tools to export Aperture database information, and bring it into other applications.  But COUNTING on third-party developers to provide this kind of solution can be tricky.  Ask the people who are tying to get years of work out of Portfolio.  

As Beardy says, your relationship with your asset manager is likely to be one of serial monogamy over the years. Unless you have a good pre-nup, the breakup could get ugly.
Peter

peter,
 in your quote "ask the people who are trying to get years of work out of portfolio"   peter currently i am one year into portfolio 7 with 20,000 images all meticulously keyworded, ive decided to dump portfolio for iview , will there be a problem of me getting my keyword info out of portfolio and into iview?

[peterkrogh]

Thomas,
You can probably get it out, but it might be a lot of work if you have been working with RAW files.  Beardsworth has written about it elsewhere on this forum.
Peter

[johnbeardy]

Thomas

Take a look at my "Update iView from Excel" at http://www.beardsworth.co.uk/iview.php which was designed for that purpose.

It lets you paste into Excel a csv file, such as a Portfolio text export, then select items in iView and run an Excel macro to pass over data. It uses the filename to lookup data. To adapt it, you'll need to be OK with Excel and scripting, but the code is commented.

John