I am looking to upgrade from iphoto (i know, i know) for my photo management, and trying to decide between aperture and lightroom. note that i work on a G5 and so snow leopard/intel native issues are not relevant to me. also note that this is just for management, any serious editing is done in photoshop.
This seems like the best place to ask for feedback. i tried out the demo versions long ago when they were both pretty new. i had a tough time deciding which i liked better then, though i leaned towards aperture. one thing i do really want is easy exporting to flickr, so i was happy to see that mentioned in the lightroom 3 beta. i know you can get plugins for that for aperture though.
let the suggestions pour in. =)
Cheers,
scratch
Honestly, right now, I'd wait and see. If you need to make a decision today, as much as it pains me to say it, I'd definitely go with LightRoom.
Both lines will be coming out with new versions soon (if Aperture 3 doesn't peek its head out within the next 6-9 months I think we can assume Aperture is a dead project at Apple). Aperture 3 is VERY likely to be Intel-only; LR3 might not be. That might be enough for your decision right there (once Aperture 3 comes out all updates to Aperture 2.x will cease, which is not a good thing for software housing your life's pictures).
I'm in somewhat the same boat. I have Aperture 2 running on my G5. I'm expecting to replace the G5 next year, but Apple's made me very nervous with regards to their commitment to Aperture development. I might end up moving over to LightRoom, as Adobe has made it clear they are heavily invested in moving the product forward. I initially chose Aperture because I feel it suits my style better, although LightRoom has since evolved so that it could do the same (for one: I really don't want to have to manage my photo library both in the application AND as a collection of image files on disk, as LR 1.0 insisted upon; LR 2.x follows Aperture's lead in allowing you to use a managed repository instead).
The switchover will be painful, though, because the "change list" of edits (cropping, all filters, etc) is proprietary to Aperture and LR. I'll need to leave the main photos intact in Aperture, and export just the "keepers" as JPEGs to LightRoom. I don't think Adobe makes this process easy (Apple certainly doesn't). Hopefully LR will read in all the keywording and rating information which is stored in the EXIF of the files, at least. And, after that, the "negatives" will largely just remain in Aperture, until such time as I want to re-tweak one of them. Then it will be a toss-up between firing up an old and unsupported version of Aperture or just throwing the RAW file into LR and redoing the basic edits to match before doing any more tweaking.
Not looking forward to it.
If I were choosing between the two today, I'd wait to see if Apple makes a major reinvestment in Aperture, but barring something significant, would invest in LR.
