Clueless in the UK

When I first heard of Aperture I thought it would be to iPhoto as Final Cut is to iMovie. In other words, a huge step up in capability and performance. What I found with Aperture 1.0 was something very capable but a huge step down in performance. Considering iPhoto 5 was a huge step down in performance from iPhoto 4, yet is still blazingly fast in comparison to Aperture, I was really disappointed to put it mildly.

I wrote about Aperture’s dismal performance here in the Apple discussion groups. In this Apple discussion post I actually recorded clock times for what I thought would be common operations. You can ignore most of the responses because they were wrong or did not have reasonably sized iPhoto libraries to test with. Remember, we’re trying to decide if this is a replacement for iPhoto.

So we’ve established that Aperture 1.0 and 1.0.1 were disasters but how does Aperture 1.1 compare to 1.0.1? The short answer is, Extremely favorably, but it still has a very long way to go.

I started by importing my entire iPhoto library again. Took several hours like last time, but the performance after it was done is a lot better. A lot better. Is it good enough? No, but it is getting there. For example, there are no delays bringing up the filter dialog. Second, I was able to unstack all 1100 * 2 images from the “iPhoto Editing/iPhoto Original” pairs after the initial import, in fact, able to unstack them all at once! If you remember from my 1.0.1 review (see discussion links) I couldn’t even unstack 10 of those images at once without my CPU hanging for more than an hour before giving up and killing the process. This is a huge leap forward. Still, it took several minutes to perform that operation which I think should have taken just seconds.

In fact, the single biggest factor in performance after the 1.1 upgrade is: how many thumbnails images are displayed in the thumbnail pane. If that’s 10k, then it will take 20 seconds to do that. If it’s 1000 it happens pretty quickly.

Sometimes editing operations can be as slow as before, depending again on how many thumbnails are currently displayed. So, to adjust the brightness of an image when there are 10k thumbnails displayed may take 30 seconds to respond to the mouse! But edit in a single project or album where there are only 500 or 1000 images, it’s much faster. It seems to re-populate the thumbnails after you make a change to an image, every time you initiate a change.

So, if you find the application being extremely slow, check out the number of images displayed, and if that’s large, consider creating a temporary album with the images you’re interested in and operate in that album for a while. It’s not great but it works.

Let’s compare this to iPhoto: iPhoto happily displays all the thumbnails of your entire database and when you click on an image there are no delays when you try to edit it. And if you do a basic text/keyword search in iPhoto it happens incrementally, as you type, in real time, like the Spotlight technology Apple included in Tiger. For Aperture to be several orders of magnitude slower than Spotlight, despite it’s very limited domain, is just really surprising and disappointing especially in contrast to the awesome capabilities of Spotlight.

So that’s where Aperture 1.1’s performance is at. Way way better and still way too frackin’ slow. But it’s almost usable. So, if you’re using the new and improved iPhoto 6 and are wondering about the pros and cons with respect to Aperture, here they are as I see them:

iPhoto pros

• ilife integration
• speed
• simplicity

iPhoto’s minuses

• destructive image editing
• RAW image model is completely hopeless
• limited image editing capabilities, especially white balance and highlights/shadows, my two favorites
• weak filtering/search

Here are Aperture 1.1’s pros

• non-destructive editing
• RAW image conversion
• strong image editing capabilities
• ability to have multiple versions of an image
• quick switch between master and current version
• export with meta data
• strong filtering/search
• many other features I haven’t yet discovered

Aperture’s minuses

• horrible performance
• lack of iLife integration
• single image store

Obviously this is not an exhaustive review of either iPhoto or Aperture, but it should give you an idea of what to expect if you want to start using it as an iPhoto replacement. I am still undecided. I think the ultimate performance gains will have to wait until Aperture 2.0 which might be a very long time.

In retrospect I think Apple has responded properly by reducing the price of Aperture by $200 and offering early adopters a $200 Apple store gift certificate. This, in my opinion, is recognition of that fact that Aperture 1.x fell far short of expectations. If Aperture 2.0 or 3.0 is anything like Final Cut or Adobe Photoshop in terms of quality and design, then it will again be worth $500 in my opinion. Right now I think it’s worth about $100.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 22nd, 2006 at 7:26 pm and is filed under Frack Me. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.