Aperature 1.1

Faced with a large number of images from my recent trip to Borneo I couldn't see how I could ever get through them. I therefore purchased Aperture 1.1

I find this program works very well. It was definitely faster than my old work flow of PS CS2 bridge (for browsing) to open in CS2. It is also a better way to catalogue and store images vs. Iphoto and Iview media pro.

Of course it could be faster yet so I just added 2 gigs of RAM, an updated graphics card, and an external 500 GB FW 800 drive. The last to create a "vault" The vault feature gives you one touch backup of the entire Aperture library you are working on.

Now I would have to say this program really rips. It is the best thing for digital photography since the introduction of PS.

You still use PS for you main processing, but getting there and cataloging your images is much faster and simplified now. Even though I just barely understand the basics of the program.

Now if I just had a 30" screen and a new Powerbook so I could run it on a lap top.

Good for you Dave.

What are you running it on at present?

A 1.8 GH dual processor G5. The new graphics card is the previous top of the line (I got a deal). A Nvidia GEF 6800 GT DDL.

I find myself highly torn when it comes to Aperture. Some days I just love it, other days I could scream with frustration.

One of the frustrations for me is the inability for libraries to be on networked drives. One of the big reasons why I invested in a ReadyNAS recently was the hope that I could put my Aperture library onto the NAS and leave space free on my laptop drive. I should have read the specs more closely . I'm now going to need another external FW RAID to hold the aperture library and give me some space back.

If 2.0 doesn't have support for network storage (other than X-serve RAID over a fibrechannel card), it may well be a deal breaker for me.

I'm also yet to really get a feel for the keywording methodology. I was able to keyword in iView Media Pro pretty rapidly, and have not yet been able to achieve the same efficiency in Aperture. I probably just need more practice, but that begins to sound suspisciously like work .

I am getting on very well with it but I am questioning whether it will be in my future unless v2 is less resource hungry.

I am running on a macpro (intel) with 1.5 gb Ram and also an Imac 2ghz (intel) with 1.5 gb of Ram and have have found that with my workflow I cause issues with resources.

Everything goes well - I do sorting, tagging, raw conv and raw adjustments and then metadata in Aperture but when I click that "open in external editor" button to start CS2 for fine tuning, getting artistic and resizing - you can flick a coin on if its gonna work or not or for how long.

Sometimes it works a breeze and I open images (singly) and edit them before closing them and coming back to aperture without many problems, soemtimes I can do about 4 images and then it just stops passing to cs2 and sometimes it just will not pass to cs2 at all. Opening multiple images just does not happen for me - it does not pass them over. I recieve no error messages I just guess that theres a never ending battle for resources bwteen the two programs.

To get over the probelms I have to shut down the computer and start again. Also have to make sure no other programs are open when I am using both ap and cs2 together.

I have also witnessed issues when the aperuture screen stops passing images for preview into the aperture preview pane (found a work around for this was move the side margin of the preview pane and it springs back into life for a a while). This probelm was worse when I was storing the project on an external drive (lacie) and found it reduced if I moved the project to the main drive (ithink it was an access time issue).

I wondered if anyone else had these issues? I luv it whens its working fine but dont want to spend more money on ram unless it will offer me a solution (max availalbe in Thailand is 1 gb without importing from states or europe) and I cannot afford a faster computer.

Any advice?

Paul

I find that problems passing files from Aperture to Photoshop are reduced when I start Photoshop directly, then once PS has finished booting I ask Aperture to open the file for editing. I only ever have one or two images open in PS at any one time. I have 2 GB RAM in a 2 GHz MacBook Pro. I have been running into more issues of resource allocation as my hard drive has filled up, as it stands I only have about 5GB of the laptop HD available, and I think that is giving the system issues with virtual memory availability.

I find that problems passing files from Aperture to Photoshop are reduced when I start Photoshop directly,

Thanks Craig, I will try that. I spent a few hours on the aperture support forum at apple today http://discussions.apple.com/category.jspa?categoryID=184

lots of issues re performance for laptops and imacs.

I will patiently wait for 1.2 in the hope that its not so resource specific. Its a great program for 300 bucks but its not worth 10,300 (10,000 for the hardware ).

Rumors are pointing to an Aperture announcement or release at Photokina later this month (sept).

I run aperture on my 1.33 GHz 17" Al book. My wife has a new 2.1GHz macbook pro 15". Huge difference. It's much faster. It does not seem to take much advantage of the dual processors, which lends credence to the theory that aperture is a video card hog, not a processor hog.

It's really nice running aperture on the new 15 book, though.

If you guys have not already done so, I recommend you look at Apple's Aperture Seminars online

http://www.seminars.apple.com/seminarsonli...ndex.html?s=203

It really shows how awesome the application already is. I love it on my new 15" Macbook pro as well. I really think it is superior at this point to either Lightroom and even PhotoMechanic; though it does have some issues as mentioned, that I think Apple will work out over the next few evolutions.

I made an interesting discovery last night... Aperture can run with a library on a networked drive

I turned AFP service on on my ReadyNAS. I had been using SMB/CIFS to connect to the RAID, and the file names of files within the library were too long or contained illegal characters. This is overcome by using AFP to connect to the RAID. I was able to move my entire Aperture library onto the NAS, change the library under Aperture's preferences, then relaunched and it started using the networked library just as it should

This has allowed me to free up about 50GB on my laptop's hard drive, making me happy.

The really cool thing: Aperture is running faster now than it did before! It must be the faster read times on the drives in the RAID. All in all a very pleasant evening B)

Yes, you can have the library anywhere, as long as you point to it in the preferences (I think, as I do not have Aperture here on my work computer) You can also have multiple libraries; the weakpoint is that you can only work with one library at a time. For those who have multiple hard drives with pics, Aperture facilitates importing these as folders into one library, maintaining all the folder structures and hierarchies down to the last folder which becomes an album. Even though the fact that you cannot work with multiple libraries is considered a weak point, it would seem that importing all drives etc into one large centralized library would ultimately make a lot of sense, speeding things up in a big way.