I am leaning to getting Aperture for my new 27" i7 iMac. I have been a casual user of iPhoto for a while using our MBP and MBA... but I do not keep a lot of photos on them. Instead, I have been keeping the "master copy" of our photos on desktop a PC with 30" monitor... and it is getting decommissioned to make room for the iMac. I have used a number of photo editing programs including Photoshop elements... which I am not too crazy about.
I would recommend to try Pixelmator, Photoline or Pixel instead of PSE on the mac. PSE for mac is generally much grievance. PSE in general is limiting you by taking you by the hand.
I am probably on edge of needing Aperture instead of iPhoto. My picture collection is about 75,000 pics, and I tend to add about 4,000 - 8,000 pics per year.
Aperture is a very good solution for managing large amounts of photos.
The iMac gets opened on Christmas morning... and I am trying to plan how to migrate my pictures into Aperture. I also heard that Aperture and iPhoto can share a common library. Is that a recommended approach?
If you use Aperture to organize your photos anyway, you don't need to use iPhoto at all. Aperture is iPhoto plus much, much more. I would use a separate library and import the iPhoto library as suggested by Aperture on first startup.
My current organization on the PC is using Windows explorer in folders by year, and subfolders by event. If I was to stay with iPhoto, I think that I would drag them into iPhoto one directory at a time, so that each would become separate iPhoto events. Would I do something similar in Aperture?
There is an import wizard in Aperture for that.
We also have a lot of "common events" that span years. For example, we have made many family trips to Disneyworld... across several years. It would be nice to be able to keyword those so I could open all easily.
Aperture can do this very well.
Finally... I have heard rumors that Aperture may be upgraded to Aperture X this year... or as late as May. Any update on those rumors? I would hate to buy it and then have to upgrade right away.
I don't know. Some people claim that the new version would be released on May 26, 2010. If you would like to wait 4 months for an uncertain update, why don't you buy the cheap Pixelmator on Xmas and wait for the probable Aperture 3 end of May? At least you could edit your photos but would have to rely on iPhoto for organizing.
/Jim