Some time ago, Apple released a photo management app called Aperture. The consensus was that it didn't make the grade. Later they released a new version, which was recommended to me at a wedding a few weeks back (not my own). It had some interesting sounding features, so I decided to find out what it was like by trying the demo.


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First up, it doesn't currently support the Canon EOS 450D's RAW format. The files will import (the import UI is excellent), but Aperture will be unable to view them. For the time being you have to use Adobe's DNG converter (which does support the camera). If you export the .CR2 files from Aperture, Adobe's converter won't be able to read them. I had to copy the files onto the computer using the EOS Utility from Canon (which is fairly awful), convert them and then import the DNGs into Aperture. Apple link to the Adobe DNG converter as a way to support cameras not natively supported in Aperture. It would be nice if Aperture could just pump the files through the DNG converter automatically if required/requested.

The photo viewing UI seems pretty nice. It has the typical Apple animation spam but is reasonably snappy. Sometimes however it's hard to tell what display mode you're in. The neatest feature, one that should appear in more applications is the idea of a stack. You can collect a whole pile of photos of the same subject into a single stack, which can then be collapsed to one image on the filmstrip. You can then compare the currently chosen best image against all the other images in the stack and choose a new best image.

Apple advertise a rich selection of keyboard shortcuts so that you needn't take your hands of the keyboard, but to me these seem to suffer from typical Apple keyboard-shortcut brain-damage. I think there is a UI to edit them, but I didn't check.

Aperture offers a number of image adjustment and editing tools. While the algorithms employed here don't seem any more advanced than those in the Gimp, the UI seems to be reasonably well thought out. It allowed me, who knows relatively little about image processing to adjust the sliders and come up with a nice image. There are little checkboxes to indicate whether or not to apply the effect, which allows you to gauge the effect. Something simple that really impressed me was being able to show the sensor hot/cold spots as an overlay so that you could compensate for sensor burnout/blackout. Image adjustments are applied non-destructively.

By default, Aperture wants to store your photos in its Aperture Library, which you can put anywhere you like on the system. The library is some sort of opaque storage, I've not had a look to see if it uses a technology that you could recover your files from. You can however store photos anywhere you like and just reference them in the Aperture Library, which would guarantee that you can always access your photos later.

Aperture can export your photos (either masters or versions) as RAW originals or JPEGs (possibly other things too) to your computer. Apple also advertise direct export to Flickr. It turns out however that this is implemented as a 3rd party plugin and costs you extra (I don't really mind this, I just wish Apple were more upfront about it).

My first impression: it seems reasonably neat and worth further experimentation. It's probably not for managing the random photos you take from day to day, but seems well suited to dealing with the photos from a specific project. It's probably worth $270, assuming that it's supported for more than 20 minutes (although, this is Apple), it's cheaper than Adobe Lightroom (which I've not yet tried). I wish it could natively handle my camera, but I assume this will come in time. It has some really swish features that I would love to see appear in F-spot.

(rest of photo set)