Aperture 3 - how stable is it?

[Boo The Hamster]

Just bought myself a new MBP (with 8gb ram) as an upgrade from my 4 year old Macbook.
My iPhoto library is growing slowly but steadily (a few thousand pictures at present), and I've been considering Aperture 3.

I like the idea of more manual control over the organisation of the photos, plus the additional editing features.

However, reading various reviews on the Mac App store and elsewhere, I'm concerned about the number of people reporting regular crashes, memory leaks and so on.

I know people with a complaint tend to be far more vocal than those who are happy, so it's entirely possible that it's a small but noisy minority having trouble, while most people are bug-free.

Just wondered what people's experiences were, whether it may be worth waiting for Aperture 4, or indeed just sticking with iPhoto?

For the price, if Aperture 3 was stable, I'd have it tomorrow, but few things annoy me more than buggy software.

Anybody out there care to comment on their experiences, good or bad?

Cheers!

 

[robgendreau]

I'd wait. Odds are if you bought 3 you'd have to pay full for 4; note there aren't upgrades in the App Store.

I would have recommended you try the demo, but it's gone. So I'd wait a bit, and in the meantime try a demo of Lightroom

I haven't found Aperture 3 to be very buggy; slow on occasion, but not too bad a problem. But it's a good idea to compare it with LR anyway.

 

[TyroneShoes2]

I've had it now for only a couple months, but buggy? You bet.

If I'm lucky, I can get through a 4 hour session without a crash. But Ive never seen it crash more than once an hour at the very most. Its not destructive, however; reopen the app and you are right where you left off. Still, Apple software crashing? Usually unheard of in my experience.

The other thing is that if you zoom in to fix issues with a photo, such as a patch of a blemish, it can take a long time, at least on a 1.7 i5. It also regularly distorts the entire picture when editing while zoomed in, and it takes a minute for it to come back. Sometimes retouching just seems like it might not be working at all, and I have to restart. But that is not often (the distorted screen redraw while editing zoomed in seems to happen a lot). Killing all other apps seems to minimize the problems.

I have a MBA with a 128 SSD and 4 GB of RAM, and had about 30-40 GB free on the HDD. After editing for an entire day, maybe 6 hours or more (I can't put this thing down its so much fun) I got a "HDD full" message. WTF!? I checked, and it was reporting 2.8 GB. I did not have all that much in the Aperture trash, but I emptied that trash, the main trash, and iMovie and iPhoto trash (none of which should have had much in them either) and then over about a 2 minute time span saw my available space slowly grow back to 30-40 GB.

At the time I chalked that up to Aperture maybe creating a lot of temp files, but that never really made sense to me; heavily retouching a couple dozen 12 MP photos really didn't seem like it should eat up 35 GB in temp files.

Maybe this was due to the memory leak you have alluded to; at the time that did not cross my mind. I have not seen this sort of issue since, but I have not hammered it as hard as I did that particular day.

 

[njean777]

I have never had any problems with Aperture 3, I am not a heavy user of it by any means, but love the organization and tools to be able to edit photos.

 

[Medic278]

I have never had a stability problem with Aperture. All in all I have been very happy with it and it works great. I don't know where you heard of stability problems but I have never experienced them, I would highly recommend it to anyone who needs photo editing software!

 

[Boo The Hamster]

Saw most of the worrying reviews on the Mac App store, and Googling 'Aperture 3 problems' turns up a few more.

Sounds like more people are happier with it than not though, so may well take the plunge.

Thanks all!