Psycho Sensei

Like many photographers with HUGE libraries of digital photos, I eagerly awaited the unveiling of Apple's Aperture. At first glance, it looked like just what I needed - an easy organizer for digital photos that also does rudimentary "tweaking" of photos. So off I ran to the Apple Store online and bought the product. As always, it was shipped quickly and arrived happily at my house. That's when the disappointment began....

So there I was, sitting in front of my 2 mhz dual processor G5 with many trailing hard drives, with tens of thousands of photos on it, and put attempted to install the product. Nope, won't install unless you have at least 1 Gig of RAM. Annoying. Oh well, I had that on my laptop, and approximately 30,000 photos on there, so why not install it there, organize everything up, and then work on the G5 after I get more memory. It installed on the laptop, so far so good.

Then I found that in order to organize your files, Aperture copies them all. Gee, can't do that with the laptop with only 100 gigs of hard drive space. That's annoying, says me. It would have been very nice if Aperture could use the already existing iPhoto libraries without making copies, but alas this was not to be. Ok, so I backed everything up onto a firewire drive, deleted the photos from the powerbook, then imported everything back over, starting with small chunks.

Despite the small chunks, import crashed Aperture many times. In addition, it was S L O W. Very S L O W. In fact, it was so annoyingly slow that I just gave up and set things up to import the whole thing while I went to sleep.

Upon waking up, I found that just about everything had imported happily into Aperture without unhappy crashes. This was good. However, despite it being an organizer, there was no way I could find to take the entire library of files and look for duplicates, then perhaps choose the largest file and delete the others. Wouldn't THAT be a nifty thing to do? Nope, isn't such a function that I could find, so I started going through project after project, trying to find duplicates then resort the photos. This, was also insanely S L O W.

So tell me - they SAY that Aperture is supposed to replace iPhoto for those of us who have huge numbers of files. However, if it's barely usable because of its lack of speed and features that digital photographers might need, why bother? I really hope that 1.1 fixes some of this stuff.

Anyone know any REALLY STUDLY organizer programs for the Mac?

p.s. More annoyance. Tried to rate a photo. It rated it, then changed the display, showing only 200 photos, then S L O W L Y loaded the photos back in, and scrolled back to the top of the window, so I would have to then scroll all the way back down again, waiting for the display to catch up. Foo.