Digital photography is a wonderful technology. Gone are the days of having to pay for a roll film or paying to have it developed even though several frames in the roll might be duds. I don’t need to store film in the fridge or worry about sending my camera through the XRay machine at the airport. And the added convenience of being able to select ISO settings on the fly is simply a freedom that film didn’t really afford.
But such convenience can (and does in my case) come at a cost. The freedom to snap pictures indiscriminately means that I’m generating a lot more photos than I probably would have were I to shoot using film. And with the gigabytes of photos taken comes a commitment of time that I must expend in order to sift through the virtual rolls of digital film. Furthermore, I must be careful to backup my digital shots since the chance of a hard drive failure is much more likely than the chance of a fire in my house (knock wood). Having lost lots of data over the years due to hard drive failures, I’m now particularly concerned about backing up what is precious to me. Most important data is backed up to an external hard drive connected to my Mac and also copied to a FreeBSD server running ZFS raidz.
When I first got my dSLR I tried to use iPhoto as a means for managing all my photos. The problem is, I’m a bit of a filesystem control freak. I couldn’t stand the fact that iPhoto was importing my photos into another library and sorting using their own folder structure. It also seemed to me that after having a few thousand photos in my library, it would take forever for iPhoto to start up. So not long afterwards, I stopped using iPhoto and opted, instead, to simply copy photos off my CF cards into dated folders that I would create. I would use Adobe Bridge to rifle through my folders to examine my photos. After a while, it became clear that this solution also wasn’t working out too well because I didn’t really have any ability to organize the photos short of moving files around on the filesystem.
When I sold my PowerMac and got my MacBook Pro, I once again considered using iPhoto ’08 with its added improvements. However, Adobe was running a promotion for Photoshop CS3 upgrades for a mere $299 so I went for that and got the latest version of Adobe Bridge as part of the deal. Almost at the same time, Apple release Aperture 2.0 and my 30-day trial had just ended. They also lowered the price! I ruminated on my options for a few days and decided to buy Aperture 2.0.
What appeals to me about Aperture 2.0, aside from it’s fairly easy image editing capabilities, is its ability to use reference images. This means that I can have an organizational topology that is different from how I’ve structured the files on the filesystem. Why is this such a boon? Because it means I can store digital images in any manner that I please (whatever is conducive to my backup and sharing infrastructure) while still maintaining the ability to organize them into virtual folder/projects/albums. For example, I can have the photos stored on the FreeBSD server making them accessible to all computers in my house and still choose to organize the files differently within Aperture.
Anyway, I’ve only just started to learn the Aperture ropes but so far, I’m fairly happy with its functionality. It isn’t without its bugs. For example, there have been times when thumbnails have gotten out of sync with the actual photos. In those cases, I’ve had to either rebuild the Aperture library by holding down Command and Option while starting Aperture or even so far as deleting all the AP.* folders in the Aperture library and having Aperture regenerate the thumbnails. This is a pain but hopefully it will be fixed soon.
