iPhoto enough or something more powerful?

[grapii]

I'm new to Mac and just purchased my first MBP.
I'm no pro photographer, not even a semi-amateur, all I do is take family shots. Over the last few years, I've accumulated over 12000 photos, mainly of the kids, all organised in folders.

I hardly do any retouching, just the occasional red-eye, add brightness or darkness....basic stuff really.

What I am looking for is a organiser that can handle not only the current set of photos, but as the collection grows to be able to keep up.

And must be easy to use, I don't want a steep learning curve. For video editing I purposely chose iMovie over Final Cut or Premiere, as it's easy to use and serves my purpose.

I know in iPhoto you can split the library (iPhoto Library Manager) if it becomes too clunky, but I don't really want to do that....want to keep it simple in one place and again easy to use.

I read this about Aperture "All the tools to manage a giant library - When your photos number in the thousands, you need easier ways to find what you’re looking for..", and "Never run out of hard drive space - As your iPhoto library grows, it may become too big to store on your computer’s hard drive."

So the question is for my needs, which offers the best organisation features? How many can iPhoto handle compared to Aperture before it becomes slugish?

Thanks

 

[miles01110]

iPhoto should be fine for you.

If you don't want to use iPhoto, you can do minor retouching and cropping straight from Preview and just keep things organized in the Finder.

 

[aristobrat]

I like Aperture better than iPhoto when it comes to managing photos.

Specifically, I like how Aperture lets you create subfolders for your pictures. (i.e. 2009 > Vacations > Germany > Munich > Castles). iPhoto puts your pictures into "events", which are listed sequentially. There's no nesting, unless you want to take the time to create albums for each one (which can be nested).

Aperture also makes it easier (IMO) to store subsets of your pictures in different locations (drives), but still have them accessible from the same library. Technically, iPhoto can do this (if you tell it not to import your pictures into the library, and link them in from an external source) but it's nowhere near as flexible.

Apeture does have a learning curve. Check out the How To videos, if you haven't already:
http://www.apple.com/aperture/how-to/

I have about 20,000 photos, both in Aperture and iPhoto, and neither one feels "bogged down".

 

[Gold89]

Unless you start taking photos in RAW format iPhoto will serve you just fine, works well even with very big libraries.

 

[grapii]

I like Aperture better than iPhoto when it comes to managing photos.

Specifically, I like how Aperture lets you create subfolders for your pictures. (i.e. 2009 > Vacations > Germany > Munich > Castles). iPhoto puts your pictures into "events", which are listed sequentially. There's no nesting, unless you want to take the time to create albums for each one (which can be nested).

Aperture also makes it easier (IMO) to store subsets of your pictures in different locations (drives), but still have them accessible from the same library. Technically, iPhoto can do this (if you tell it not to import your pictures into the library, and link them in from an external source) but it's nowhere near as flexible.

Apeture does have a learning curve. Check out the How To videos, if you haven't already:
http://www.apple.com/aperture/how-to/

I have about 20,000 photos, both in Aperture and iPhoto, and neither one feels "bogged down".

Ummm interesting.

All my current photo's are organised similar to yours in folders by year. This works perfect for my Media Centre PC, but I was about to to import this structure into iPhoto. Then albums I like I was going to export it manually and place them back into the same folder structure so that Media Centre can display them.

I did look at not importing into iPhoto and leaving in file folders, but if I edit the photo it keeps the edited photo in iPhoto. which means I'll have the original photos in folders and edited ones inside the iPhoto library...which'll get confusing.

How does this work in Aperture? does the edited photos stay in the folder structure that the original photo is? or like iPhoto puts the editions in it's own library package?

One other question about photos. How do you organise loads of non-event photos? I've never deleted any pictures I've taken, unless they're really bad. for example, I have 30 pictures of my son with a santa clause hat on. Some smiling, some crying, some looking like he's about to break wind, some with his eyes closed, etc... Should I import all of these into iPhoto/Aperture or only the best ones? How do you choose? as to me they're all cute.