Aperture 3 Woes

I started using Aperture 3 about two months ago. There were a few performance issues and quirks from the beginning, but in general the software worked, and the very attractive feature set kept me from going elsewhere.

But I've hit a show-stopper. Actually, two. First, exporting edited RAW files takes a long time. Second, exporting a project to a new library from a library that contains referenced masters mysteriously fails. 


I shot a wedding a few weeks ago, my first ever as the main photographer. I took just over 1000 photos with two cameras. I was away from home working on a laptop so I downloaded the files and imported into Aperture as a referenced library. The plan was to get as much editing as possible done on the laptop, and then move the project to my iMac at home and finish.

I normally do little tweaks in Aperture (exposure, white balance, black point) and then jump to PhotoShop CS4 for the heavy lifting. This process has a few problems but in general it's OK if you don't have too many files to deal with. But this time I had 1000+ photos to get through. I wanted to select the good ones, process them, and get them online as soon as possible. Aperture's lift and stamp feature is awesome for this kind of stuff; PhotoShop actions do not come close. So first I stamped a contrast and saturation tweak onto the files I'd selected to use. Then I noticed that the highlights on the dress were blown in some of the shots. No problem, these are RAW files. The highlights aren't really blown, they just look that way. So I stamped a recovery and highlights adjustment onto several photos. Then I did some simple retouching. Using Aperture for all the adjustments and never jumping to PS, I made it through 300+ files in a couple hours. Not bad. Time to export to a web gallery.

Oops.

It turns out that on anything but top of the line hardware Aperture 3 is dog slow at exporting RAW files when edits have been applied. I tried it on a MacBook Air that I bought last year. It's a dual core with 2gb RAM. I know this is under-spec, but I didn't expect it to be unusable.

It gets worse the more edits you apply to the files. I started an export of 376 files to a web gallery around 3pm. At 6am the following morning (15 hours later!) it had not even reached 25%. I cancelled the process, because I had a plane to catch and didn't have the luxury of leaving the laptop to sit for another 2 days. A quick google showed that many other photographers are having the same problem with slow exports.

When I got home I tried to move the project to my iMac to finish processing and do the upload. Then came show-stopper number two.

In Aperture on my laptop I option clicked (ok, I two-finger tapped) on the wedding project and selected export > project as new library. Since I was working with a referenced library, I checked that box that says "consolidate masters into exported library" so that the exported library would have my master RAW files in it and I could move the whole thing to the iMac. This is one of the great features of Aperture 3. Except that it didn't work.

The export finished quickly, and Aperture gave me a nice pop-up message on the screen to tell me it was done. It only took a few minutes. That's fast, considering how many photos I had in that project. In fact, it's oh-crap-something's-wrong fast.

I checked the newly exported library. It was 1.13gb. Weirdness. I had 24gb of photos, and a library exported with the "consolidate masters" command was only 1.13gb. Something didn't make sense. So I opened the new library on my iMac and found that only a few of the photos were actually in the library. The rest of the photos were still referenced files and only had reduced size previews. And Aperture was complaining that they pointed to masters on an unmounted volume.

I browsed to the library package in Finder and opened it. (option click > show package contents) Wading into the masters folder I found 12 files. That's 12 out of an expected 1056. Not good. So I tried the export again. 12 again. I was doing the export to an external USB drive so I could carry the library to my other computer. I thought maybe the USB drive was causing some weird behavior, so I tried exporting to the internal hard drive on the laptop. This time I got 21 master images into the new library. A little better, but not really what I expected from a $200 software application. No errors, no indication of a problem, just failing to perform as advertised.

In the end I had to export my edited RAW files to JPEG on the laptop, which took about 14 hours. That was the only way to salvage the editing and sorting work I’d done on the laptop, and transfer it to the desktop. So much for the supposed flexibility of working with multiple libraries.

Aperture is supposed to be a professional package. It’s not just for browsing your vacation snaps; you’re supposed to be able to get real work done. That means dealing with RAW files. That means dealing with multiple libraries. But if you use Aperture 3 to do any serious editing of RAW files, be prepared to spend the next 2 days getting your images out of Aperture. And be careful with referenced libraries. You may not be able to transfer your Aperture work to another computer without first dumping to JPEG and re-importing.

I've just downloaded Abobe PhotoShop LightRoom Beta 2. Let's see how it compares...