RB

Thanks for the feedback, I try to present balanced information here. I see that you didn’t take a look at any other information on the site. You may want to check out the PDF guide to Aperture organization if you have a minute. Aperture falls into that category in my opinion of – hard to learn – easy to use. It does not force you into a predefined way of doing your work, it provides a set of tools that if you don’t understand exactly how they interact you may end up with a big mess. I do mention this in some other articles.

If you are using stacking without making a lot of use of albums I can see how you feel the way you do. I assume you are talking about albums when you mention “galleries”. I hope your biggest issue is not that Apple chose to use a visual indicator of blue vs. yellow folders for folders that contain projects and objects vs. folders inside of projects. Don’t get me wrong I have my top ten list of things that need improvement but they are far different than yours would be. Maybe I will publish a short article on the things I really really think most heavy duty users of Aperture need.

If you have a couple of minutes I would love to hear how you are using Aperture in your workflow “every day” and where you are getting hung up. IMHO the compare tools alone are worth the price of admission, the ability to arbitrarily group and order images in as many ways as I want to without having a ton of duplicate or near duplicate files all over my drives is gravy. I can honestly say that I am at least 10x more productive with Aperture than before it existed.

RB

Mostly in the matter of “stacks,stack mode, compare mode…” etc. I find Aperture’s organization tools completely anti-intuitive and well, a mess. Different colored folders can only go certain places, Aperture randomly hides things in “stacks”, and the concept of “galleries” (supposedly based on iTunes playlists) is maddeningly inconsistent (ie sometimes you can delete things, others you can’t, others still it deletes the item AND another item…).

It’s truly bizarre, especially for this long time Mac using photographer, but Aperture makes it extremely difficult to keep track of or organize your photos. The ugly, hard to read, and non-customizable interface just add insult to injury. I use Aperture every day; as you point out, there’s nothing else out there that will do what it does. Much like Democracy, Aperture sucks, just not as bad as the other DAMs out there. Failing to point out its formidable flaws (even in v 2.x, Ap still feels very beta, not quite finished) does nobody any favors.

RB

RB