Going Back to iPhoto... Sorry Aperture

I wanted to love Aperture 3. I really tried to love it. But after giving it a very decent chance, I have to say it hasn't floated my boat. That is to say, it hasn't offered a significant value proposition over iPhoto – certainly not ~$200 worth.

Aperture 3 was basically a catch-up to iPhoto '09. It improves slightly on the Faces and Places features that iPhoto '09 introduced, but the improvements are small UI changes which would be – and probably will be – easily adopted in iPhoto '10 when it comes out. But I can't shake the feeling that this is lipstick on the pig. Aperture 3 looks gorgeous, like a true Apple UI. But it can't match the intuitiveness and minimalism of iPhoto '09.

Maybe I'm missing something important, but the main advantages Aperture 3 offers over iPhoto '09 seem to boil down to the following:

1. Stacks
2. Editing
3. Workflow
4. Um....

Stacks

This is a nice workflow feature for the first pass over a shoot when you get home. It is especially useful if, like me, you like to set the camera to rapid-fire and hold down the shutter button.

But unfortunately the UI for stacks is very finicky, and the end result is I have huge numbers of photos on my hard drive that I don't and will never want.

The equivalent in iPhoto is really simple. All I do is use the space bar to preview the image at maximum size, and use the left & right arrow keys to compare them, and just delete the non-pick-worthy ones. They go to iPhoto's Trash folder, so if I make a mistake I can easily undo with a simple Cmd-Z.

Editing

Without a doubt, Aperture 3 is a fantastic photo editing tool. The sheer number of adjustments and controls available is incredible, and the UI for applying them is genius. I love the way they can be added and removed, previewed, brushed in & out and feathered, the edge-awareness, batch editing, etc. Just brilliant.

But in reality, when I come home from an overseas trip with 2,000+ images to process, I can't realistically spend a lot of time fiddling and tweaking the photos. Usually, if it's not a good shot straight off the camera, it goes in the bin. I also find that the quality of photos generally declines as you play with them. The bottom line is: If it's a bad photo to begin with, no amount of editing will make it a good photo.

But for what it costs (nothing), iPhoto is no slouch at editing either. If you have a good photo to begin with, iPhoto gets the job done extremely well.

One often-cited advantage of Aperture 3's editing is that it is non-destructive, i.e. the original "master" photo stays as-is, and all the edits are stored as tiny metadata and applied dynamically every time you view or export the image. This is certainly elegant, but the argument that it saves disk space is ridiculous when you consider that behind every stack there are photos you will never use, and behind the default "Unrated or better" view are hundreds of "Rejected" photos you never even see, all stored on your hard disk. The benefit of iPhoto's approach is that it's very fast to view and export.

Given that I went and paid for the damn thing, I'll keep Aperture 3 around for the occasional special editing task.

Workflow

I don't really see a workflow emerging from Aperture 3 - it is just a tool; you still need to come up with your own workflow that uses it. I had a pretty smooth workflow in iPhoto (perhaps the subject of another post) which worked just fine – in fact it was as good if not better than the most commonly recommended workflow in Aperture.

But the most infuriating things about Aperture's workflow are the beginning and the end.

The import process in Aperture is intensely unsatisfactory. In iPhoto, you plug in your card or camera, and it immediately recognises it and displays the import screen. In Aperture, there are a lot more clicks.

After the import, iPhoto asks you if you want to delete the photos from the card. So does Aperture, but for some reason it asks you twice, and then it doesn't even seem to work – every time the card is ejected before it is wiped clean.

In iPhoto, once you've done an import, you're done. For some reason, Aperture spends ages "Importing" the photos after you've pulled them off the card. And while this is happening, the performance of the application – no, the whole computer – suffers noticeably.

But much worse than import in Aperture is how you actually use the photos for something useful after processing them. Aperture 3 inherited the Flickr, Facebook and MobileMe support from iPhoto '09, and it's basically the same, but iPhoto remembers what you've uploaded and you can easily control the online albums from right within iPhoto.

iPhoto has a very fast file export as well, probably due to the pre-rendered edited copies of each photo that it has; but Aperture seems to take forever to export images.

The most annoying thing of all is the integration with the rest of the Apple universe. iPhone (and presumably iPad) syncing is fantastic with iPhoto, but pretty much sucks balls with Aperture. All other applications on the Mac know how to get photos from iPhoto, but not Aperture. Even the Mac screensaver doesn't seem to know how to use the filters in Aperture.

Um....

I'm sure there are a lot of other features in Aperture that I've overlooked and/or not discovered in my 3 months of usage. But if those features are so great, why were they not discoverable? I watched every inspiring introduction video on Apple's website...

Maybe Apple isn't Good at Pro?

I can see how Aperture might have made sense before iLife '09, especially for those who have truly huge libraries and needed a way to organise them, but with the tiny amount of effort it takes to use Faces and (to a lesser extent) Places in iPhoto, there really is no rational reason I can think of to do any manual organising anymore.

I had a similar, if not more extreme, reaction to Final Cut Express vs. iMovie. I'm starting to think that while Apple excels at casual, consumer-level software design, they are not so good at the professional stuff. In the case of Final Cut, it was patently obvious that there is a backward compatibility problem: (Probably) thousands of professionals make their living with Final Cut, so Apple can't afford to mess up their workflows by changing the UI, even if it is a huge improvement. Perhaps the same is true for Aperture.

iLife apps don't have that problem, so both iPhoto and iMovie got major changes in '08 and '09, and are now much, much better as a result.

And now we are seeing some seriously functional stuff on iPad... I am getting the impression that Apple's special talent is to provide all the functionality in a simple, intuitive, discoverably deep UI experience, which can and should render obsolete the need for "Pro" applications.