Q&A: Aperture + iPhoto

Why don't you try it out and tell us?

The photos won't disappear, but when you click on them, you'll get a ! symbol.

I have a similar setup, however I use the vastly superior Lightroom 2 program. For my amateur shots, taken with my DSLR, I use Lightroom. For my regular shots, taken with various P&S camera's over the last few years, I use iPhoto. When I make a jpeg out of my RAW files in Lightroom, I export the jpeg to a folder like "Finished Jpegs" and import that into iPhoto as well to show off my photography work. From there, I upload to Flickr for my photography and Facebook for my regular jpegs.

Razeus said:

vastly superior Lightroom 2

Click to expand...

Not sure that everyone agrees with that


As for the original topic, I'm not entiry sure what happens with images importet directly from a camera or mail (I'm guessing that camera imports are saved). What I do know is that the references from Aperture are only the "Preview", not the originals. Which is good or bad depending on what you plan to use them for I guess.

Personally, I import everything into aperture, and then import photos worthy of viewing/slideshow/face-tags etc to iPhoto. Partly because I prefer to use iPhoto for presenting photos but Aperture for editing/orginizing, partly
because (I haven't have the time to test this yet) it will allow me to share the whole library with my girlfriend (in Users/Shared).

Dale Cooper said:

Not sure that everyone agrees with that


As for the original topic, I'm not entiry sure what happens with images importet directly from a camera or mail (I'm guessing that camera imports are saved). What I do know is that the references from Aperture are only the "Preview", not the originals. Which is good or bad depending on what you plan to use them for I guess.

Personally, I import everything into aperture, and then import photos worthy of viewing/slideshow/face-tags etc to iPhoto. Partly because I prefer to use iPhoto for presenting photos but Aperture for editing/orginizing, partly
because (I haven't have the time to test this yet) it will allow me to share the whole library with my girlfriend (in Users/Shared).

Click to expand...

I agree with LR2 being vastly superior

As long as I don't have to deal with Aperture 2's "make a duplicate file" for every RAW file I want to dodge & burn (hence the preparing blahblahblah for editing) then I concur with Lightroom 2 being vastly superior.

Razeus said:

The photos won't disappear, but when you click on them, you'll get a ! symbol.

I have a similar setup, however I use the vastly superior Lightroom 2 program. For my amateur shots, taken with my DSLR, I use Lightroom. For my regular shots, taken with various P&S camera's over the last few years, I use iPhoto. When I make a jpeg out of my RAW files in Lightroom, I export the jpeg to a folder like "Finished Jpegs" and import that into iPhoto as well to show off my photography work. From there, I upload to Flickr for my photography and Facebook for my regular jpegs.

Click to expand...

I use a similar workflow.

1. Import photos to the computer using Canoe EOS Utility. The program organizes the files in folders by year/month/date.
2. Import photos into a catalogue in Lightroom. Note that LR only saves the information about file location, i.e., no duplicates are created, ever.
3. Perform simple batch corrections (e.g., sharpening, noise reduction,) by applying user presets that I found work well with my camera (T1i) and lenses.
4. Clone the photos from which I want to create crops. This is not necessary, since Lightroom does not modify the original file when cropping, but I like to keep both the cropped version and the original shot in the catalogue.
6. Crop cloned photos.
7. Rate photos from the last import.
8. Apply keywords to 4 & 5 star rated photos.
9. Export the 4 & 5 star photos to another folder (e.g., iPhoto Originals).
10. Import the photos from this location into iPhoto.

I find that with this workflow I only keep duplicates of the photos I really like, which has become a necessity of late because my iPhoto library has grown to over 60 GB and and is getting kind of slow to work with, even on a Mac Pro!

I tried Aperture and Lightroom at the same time (downloaded the trials), and I immediately fell in love with Lightroom. It's super fast, esthetically appealing, stable as a rock. Aperture, on the other hand, seemed sluggish in comparison and it crashed a few times on me. This sealed the deal for Lightroom.