OK so this isn’t a review… just an observation. For a few years now I’ve used iView Media Pro to manage my digital photos. Finder tells me I have 15,586 of them. This obviously grows at a rate of a few thousand a year. The file size of these images also grows every time I buy a new camera. I just bought Nat a point and shoot Lumix DMC LX-2. The 10mp files it produces are about 5mb. If I use my Nikon film scanner as I still shoot 35mm I get 60mb TIFF files. Anyway the point is I need shit loads of storage which means I have to buy more and bigger hard drives to the point where I’m now considering buying a NAS box with 2 Terra Bytes of disk space, or rather 1terrabyte in RAID format. Storage however is a bit of a minor point, well because now it’s cheap… even NAS RAID arrays. The main issue is managing photos… cataloguing them, sorting them, tagging them etc….

I’ve been really happy with iView MP but as of recent developments with their company that I can not discuss because of the company I work for (dontcha just love working in an agencey) I have decided to seek and alternative. As I have a shiny new Mac Book Pro at home and am about to get an even newer one from work (w00t!) then the obvious choice is Aperture….

So I’ve been playing with Aperture for a few days now, and Photoshop CS3 for a few weeks, Photoshop for manipulating images… not filing them, though it can kinda do that these days. Anway my intital impression of aperture is to be honest thoroughly dissapointing:

1. It tries to do too much. Why would I do any photo adjustment in it when I have Photoshop. Come on, Aperture is aimed at the pro market. You’re telling me ‘Pro’s’ dont have Photoshop? SO why put some really half baked photo manipulation functionality into something that is for managing photos… or id it for both?

2. It is a M-E-M-O-R-Y H-O-G. IT needs loads and I cant work out why. iView Media Pro isn’t a memory hog.

3. It does a similar thing to what IPhoto does in terms of semi duplicating your photos….. I noticed the Aperture library was growing in file size…. why??? It should only contain a database and thumbnails? Further investigation show’s it’s generation preview images too (which perhaps explains why importing photos is slow)

4. The UI clunky… ok switching from one app to another always causes issues, but sorry Aperture is clunky as hell.

5. You need a pretty huge monitor to use it well.

Anyway, those are my observations so far… which means to hedge my bets I’m now running iView & Aperture and manipulating photos as usual in CS3…. Joy. No easier then.