Big iPhoto Library. Aperture?

[gusanitoverde]

10 years worth or family photos and vacation trips. 80 Gb of Space in my hard drive. Predominantly, I have Jpegs, .mov, .avi from different cameras that shot video and photos.

Through every new version of iPhoto, I have lost some videos since the new versions of iPhoto are not able to read them or just translate them as stills. Sad story if you do have precious memories that were stored as iPhoto 4.

Now, my iPhoto library was also scrambled in the dates since the version that was up 3 years ago. Last, in a desperate attempt to rescue my whole library, duplicates were generated. I purchased "duplicate annihilator" but I could not even run it because the library was so big, my mac could bot process it.

My photo library is now a locked mess and I need a powerful organizer.

Now, since I have backup disks of all these changing libraries, I am planning to condense all these libraries and label and rescue all the photos.

Aperture 3 now comes out and I see it as a possible replacement.

What do you think?

 

[bzollinger]

Aperture3 might do what you want it to do. However it's my understanding that it's designed more of a workflow/RAW converter/batch editor type program.

Have you explored other photo organization programs?

I was reading a little bit about Aperture3, they talk about "massive libraries" but don't give any details about how big that is. They also talk about library merging, and multiple libraries.

So in your case, it might be the best replacment for iPhoto.

 

[maflynn]

One of Aperture's strengths is its organizational abilities, you can categorize, keyword and setup a structure that's very flexible. With that said, Aperture was designed for photographers and their workflow. To be honest, I'm not even sure you can import .mov and .avi files.

My suggestion is to download the trial and play with it. See for yourself if it fits your needs.

 

[md2427]

I'm in a similar postion.....

I've got 5 libraries approx 80Gb in total.
Lots of duplicate images.

Installed Aperture3 and imported my most recent iphoto library.
All went ok.
Then imported the 2nd, 3rd, then 4th. My machine (iMac 2.8Ghz) then started to gind to a halt. I did have a few problems where my page file blew up (60Gb) and the machine complained of no disk space. I just rebooted and restarted Aperature to let it continue, checking the activity to see a list of jobs it was running and where it was up to. Left it processing for a couple of days and its now finally come back to normal performance.
Not got round to importing the last library as i wanted to have a play with the new features and i'm pretty impressed.

Couple of things that i have noticed - images originaly imported into iPhoto and edited come into Aperature 3 twice - the original and the edited version.
The edited versions look awful - really weird colours and the originals look great!
Images taken in portrait orientation are shown as lanscape even though they would have been rotated in iPhoto.

 

[gusanitoverde]

THANK YOU!
Such a valuable information... I am really going to try playing with Aperture. I will be working off an external HD just in case. I have many iPhoto libraries which I will import directly into Aperture in the external HD, so all the processing could be done by my MBP. (2.8 Ghz)

 

[mtbdudex]

THANK YOU!
Such a valuable information... I am really going to try playing with Aperture. I will be working off an external HD just in case. I have many iPhoto libraries which I will import directly into Aperture in the external HD, so all the processing could be done by my MBP. (2.8 Ghz)

fwiw, my 75 year old dad was recommended by the apple store to use Aperture instead of iPhoto. He has about 25,000 photos. The family bought him the apple one-on-one and that was the "genius/teacher" best solution for his file management and editing. He's geeked about Aperture. They showed him many things in his latest one-on-one session on using it.