I have written about Lightroom’s and Aperture’s comparative file management capabilities before but I wanted to add a different perspective or twist to it. There are a lot of people that choose to use Lightroom over Aperture because they “like” that Lightroom’s only file organizational tool happens to be whatever manually created folder structure on their hard drive. Of course Aperture can do the exact same thing if that is all you want but Aperture can do so much more. Heck you can use Aperture to sort, select, categorize, arrange, and group images any way that you want and then…. TAHHH DAHHH – use the file relocate master functions in combination with the subfolder options to have Aperture automatically create just about any pristine folder structure with your images as you could possibly imagine. AUTOMATICALLY and error free.

Personally after using Aperture I would far prefer to import my images into Aperture no matter how big a mess my folder structure was. Organize them using all of the Aperture tools and metadata and then have Aperture create the exact folder structure I wanted on disk. Even if every single image I had was in one giant pile. Aperture can suck them in and create a pristine by date folder hierarchy in one import and one relocate. Fantastic.

Hell – If I had to use Lightroom I would probably buy Aperture for the sole purpose of automating and standardizing my on disk folder structure or reorganizing the whole thing if I change my mind. I actually find it laughable that Lightroom users are so adamantly against the way Aperture “deals with folders and files”. That is only because they have no idea how quickly and easily Aperture can create recreate, reorganize, sort sift, wash, iron, and dry any folder structure that anybody could possibly imagine with about three mouse clicks.

RB

I am a little punch drunk from spending far too much time on reinventing the site with a bunch of new features so I thought I would take a little break and discuss a couple of products that serve as partial alternatives to the heavy hitters in the image work-flow field. The two players that come to mind would be Photo Mechanic and ACDSee Pro.

I don’t claim to be remotely proficient with either product in the way that I am with Aperture and Lightroom but I thought I would bring them up for those that may be looking for an alternative as well as to pose the question of why one would want to go with one of those products. While I have an opinion on this – big surprise there – I am honestly interested in others thoughts, especially those that use other products or are considering it.

Photo Mechanic seemingly enjoys a devoted following among the Photojournalist crowd. They claim that it is fast, nothing faster, especially when reviewing RAW. The funny thing is that almost none of those shooters actually shoot RAW. Photojournalists shoot JPG for what I consider an anachronistic hold out for something sort of like some sort of proof that the image is “real”. Yea I know that happens to be the deal right now but I suspect it will probably change. If anyone is interested in that thought process I would be happy to share it but let’s just say if I were a photojournalist I would most likely shoot RAW+JPG even if I HAD to deliver the out of camera JPG files.

Getting back on track, if speed is the issue I find it difficult to believe that there is any measurable performance difference between just about any work-flow software on modern equipment dealing with puny JPG files. So if the mission of the day is speed and modern hardware can chew through JPG files way faster than humans could possibly absorb them visually that would leave us with work-flow efficiency. Now don’t get me wrong, Photo Mechanic seems to be a fine piece of software for what it does but I prefer the flexibility and substantial additional function that both Aperture and Lightroom supply.

On to ACDSee. Windows only, similar but smaller feature set to Aperture and Lightroom, not free. Again a decent piece of software for a Windoze product but I am perplexed as to what would motivate someone to choose it over Lightroom or Aperture. It doesn’t seem to have the historical following that Photo Mechanic has so what is the attraction? Does it boil down to what photographers started with, what they are used to, or the desire to use something that other people don’t use?

I am not casting dispersions on either of the products that I mentioned, I am just curious as to the thought process and value proposition real or perceived that motivates the selection of either product over something like Lightroom or Aperture.

Thoughts?

RB

Ps. The image at the top is a screen shot of a JPG from my 4.1 megapixel D2H strait out of the camera with all image setting set to “normal” – who the heck needs more megapixels (at least for some things).

First keyword hierarchies – both applications support creating and modifying hierarchies of keywords. For the uninitiated this is an awesomely powerful feature. You can put keywords like rose, petunia, chrysanthemum, etc, under the keyword “flower”, which you can then put under the keyword “plant”. By doing this if you tag an image with the keyword rose and only that keyword rose when you do a search for images with the keyword “plant” or “flower” that image that you tagged with “rose” will show up as well – get it? I cannot explain how useful this is, you really need to experience it yourself – for one thing it makes keywording your images about 3000 times faster and more effective. All you do is add really really specific keywords to your images and they inherent all the more general keywords above that specific keyword in the hierarchy. You don’t even have to bother thinking about it before you start keywording. Both applications allow you to manipulate and modify the keyword hierarchy anytime you want. Example – import a bunch of images of let’s say boats. add all the kinds of boats. Pearson, Hunter, O’Day, Hobie, whatever. When you are done if you don’t already have a general keyword boat just make one and maybe a sail keyword as well. Drag the sail under the boat keyword, then drag all of the specific kinds under sail – done now you can search on boat or sail and Lightroom/Aperture will find all of the boats you just tagged with the specific kind of boats – cool. That is where the similarity ends in terms of keyword hierarchies between Aperture and Lightroom. Aperture does all this wonderfulness withing Aperture itself but only embeds the specific keyword when you export images and choose to embed the metadata or create an XMP sidecar. You can do crazy stuff like running scripts that smash the entire hierarchy into each of your images based on the specific keywords but that sort of defeats the purpose. Lightroom on the other hand will export the entire hierarchy for each specific keyword, but wait there’s more, for each and every keyword Lightroom let’s you specify whether or not to include the parent keywords and…. whether to export it at all.

Comparing the ability to assign keywords both Aperture and Lightroom have similar features. You can pretty much type each keyword in and if it does not exist both applications keep track of that for you. You can select directly from a list that is searchable/filterable. Both applications allow you to copy assign keywords more than one at a time by using one image as the model and then applying those keywords to as many images as you want. Lightroom also allows you to assign a “shortcut” to a bunch of different and unrelated keywords, Aperture does not have this but personally I have found this useless.

Both applications allow you to import and export the whole keyword scheme, if you use more than one computer to do work this is absolutely essential. It also helps if you work with an agency that has standard keyword definitions or with a team of photographers. Aperture has the ability to lock the keywords in order to avoid unintentionally adding nonexistent keywords, Lightroom does not. This is really not a big deal given that the Lightroom interface promotes clicking buttons to add keywords vs. typing them. If you stick to consistency in your work-flow by clicking buttons when you intend on using an existing keyword and typing one when you intend on adding a new keyword you will be fine. Removing keywords is easy in both applications but the user interface to do this is better in Lightroom (that is Lightroom 1 – Aperture 98,767 on the UI front) I have no idea why Apple made this so bizarre in Aperture.

One last feature that Aperture does not have and Lightroom 2 introduced is keyword synonyms. This is the ability to associate a bunch of words with an “official keyword” that mean the same thing and are treated the same when searching. This is another amazing feature heck you can even put words in a different language here. Really good if you are a stock photographer and need to tag images with a million specifics that mean the same thing. Again you can tell Lightroom that the synonyms should be exported if you want – this is a huge deal – wake up Apple get your forkin’ act together and stop giving Aperture users ridiculous things like “All Project” view so we can have a screen that looks like iPhoto isn’t that nice – give us the keyword features that Lightroom has – SOON.

The only thing that I can say about Aperture here is that again it wins in the user interface department with a couple of minor exceptions. Aperture is just elegant and pretty all the way around. Lightroom – especially the dialog boxes to manage some of the keyword functionality are clunky, cumbersome, and downright Windows 3.1′ish.

Score a big win for Adobe Lightroom 2 versus Apple Aperture 2 when it comes to keyword functionality.

RB

First the similarities between Lightroom and Aperture. Both applications can group images together either manually or automatically by the date and time stamps on the original images. They both automatically put new versions/virtual copies in a stack with the original master image. You an move images “up” or “down” in a stack or move an image right to the top. Images at the top of the stack are the images that represent the stack when the stack is closed and there for provide an easy way to select only the images at the top of stacks when all stacks are closed.

The big difference between Aperture2 and Lightroom2 is that stacks are inherent and visible no matter where you are looking at an image in Aperture. When using Lightroom you only have access to stacks and the related stack functionality when looking at images in the library module and then only when clicked on a folder (the closest thing to an Aperture project) view. For instance if you drag an image in a stack into a collection that image shows up in the collection but there is no indication when viewing the collection that it is part of an image stack. There is no stack functionality at all when viewing a collection with one exception. If you create a new virtual copy or version of an image in a collection it will automatically be added to a stack with the original image when viewing that image in a folder. In aperture it is apparent that an image is in a stack no matter where you are looking at it, in an album, a smart album, the project, etc. This may not seem like a big deal but it is huge in terms of a streamlined work-flow. When combined with the functionality of “album picks” in Aperture, the ability for different images to show up at the top of a stack in every different album or album like thing is a huge time saver for creating and managing various versions of an image for different output purposes. Take for example the need for different image crops for standard paper sizes. In Aperture you can close all of your stacks, select all of them (or filter based on whatever criteria you want) create a new album with those. Hit one key to make a new version and then apply an 8×10 crop to all of them at the same time. Just the act of doing this causes the new versions created in the context of the album to show up at the top of the stack in that album. Don’t get me wrong there are ways of accomplishing this in Lightroom with much less fanfare than the way we all used to do things like this but Aperture’s stacks/stack picks/album picks are major work-flow efficiency tools when used to their best advantage. The Light room equivalent is more like go to the folder, close all the stacks, select all images or filter/select all images, create virtual copies, create new collection, drag collection to collection set, select all images in collection, apply black and white preset. Not a big deal but here is the big deal but longer and clunkier.

The other thing that is different is what is almost a total lack of short cut keys to manipulate stacks in Lightroom. WTF, once you have some experience using an application and you are whizzing through your work-flow using short cut keys and one or two are missing for what you want/need to do it’s like hitting a brick wall going 90 mph. The same applies to the lack of short cut keys for Lightroom compare mode. If you get proficient using both Aperture2 compare features and Lightroom features you will feel like you are in slow motion, mouse move point, click, hell in Lightroom. Talking about compare features for a moment, Lightroom has a workable compare mode and just enough keys to make you want the ones it does not have. Lightroom also has absolutely no connection between it’s compare features and it’s stack features. The big missing key as compared to Aperture is the set compare item key. Don’t think this is a big deal? You should have seen the seizures and conniptions that the experienced Aperture users had when Apple removed not that key but the short cut that put you into compare mode and set the compare item at the same time due to newbie users accidently putting themselves in compare mode. The speed of compare mode, short cut keys and stack mode are deal breakers when comparing Aperture2 to Lightroom2 for a lot of people. Stack mode in Aperture2 is like compare mode but tied to image stacks. A summary is that the right/left arrow keys only move the candidate image within the stack, they won’t go beyond. The up/down arrow keys move from stack to stack. When changing stacks the “stack pick” or image at the top of the stack is automatically set to the compare images. Last but not least, ta da… there is a shortcut key/function that replaces the compare image with the candidate AND makes it the stack pick.

It’s also kind of nice to do a search or use a global smart album and know that an image that shows up is part of an image stack, in other words has other versions or similar shot variations. Even if the other version do not meet the search or smart album there is a grey box around the image along with a badge indicating the number of images in a stack that the image is a part of.

The bottom line stacks, compare mode, and their relationship to versions/virtual copies and collections/albums are workable in Lightroom and better than anything we had a few years ago but Aperture2 blows the living crap out of Lightroom2 when it comes to stack functionality when looked at in the context of an overall work-flow.

RB

RB

Name changed wrote:

I use both applications both on almost a daily basis. If this is your number
one reason to switch I see you switching back and forth and to and fro
to just about anything that comes along. This functionality is
replicated using other Aperture features in a heartbeat. Good luck
saving a ton of time with this one.

Keyword synonyms are nice I totally agree that this is really cool -
esp for multilingual photographers or publications. Bet you you will
see Keyword functionality beefed up in the next Aperture release it’s
been about the same since v1 (long before LR was even a glimmer in
Adobe’s eye)

Aperture can do the same thing with one caveat that there are several
scripts make work (namely putting the hierarchy in the exported version)

“Non Destructable” is this a new technology that I missed or didn’t quite
fathom. Anywho – the localized adjustments are nice and Aperture’s D+B
plugin is a joke but not a deal breaker for most folk especially with
tools like Viveza. and disk space is cheap anyway.

I have 300,000+ images in my main library – no issues. Maybe it’s you
or your hardware, or something. LR has a database – don’t count your
chickens so fast.

Agreed way better DNG support and the new camera profiles and profile
tools that not many people even know are out there are a game changer -
Apple needs to think about this and hopefully do something similar or
better yet open up the RAW processing engine and let other people do it.

As for noise – get a D3 or D700 all noise reduction *****.

Bye
We’ll miss you over here, can’t wait to see you in the LR forums. Have
fun don’t worry about us idiots over here we’ll get along I hope
without all of you wonderful contributions.

RB

Ps. 100 shots? Save your self some time spent in learning a new app use bridge or finder.

Aperture gives you two different ways to manage your original “master” image files. The first way is the managed masters method. Using managed masters Aperture pretty much completely insulates you from having to manage your images files at all. Aperture imports the images into its Library and figures out where to put them for you. This is great for libraries that are not of a massive scale, like on your laptop. Using managed masters pretty much frees you from having to make decisions about where to put the images that you download from your camera. One thing that I need to clear up about managed masters and the Aperture library is the unreasonable fear that a lot of photographers have about Aperture somehow squirlling their images away in some super secret, unintelligible, highly complicated, weirdo structure that is just waiting for the slightest breeze to blow for them to be lost and gone forever. Let me put you at ease right now, this is not the case. The Aperture library is pretty much a folder/directory with a special flag that makes it look like one big file when viewed in the Finder. Don’t believe me? Fire up a terminal (command line) window and cd to ~/Pictures and then do an ls on the “Aperture Library.aplibraryls”. Look Ma, I can see all the stuff in there. Yup, and guess what. Aperture automagically does the exact same thing you would probably do manually it creates another directory inside for each project and puts your original master images in there. I think it is hilarious how many people I see mirror the exact same structure on a single disk manually instead of letting Aperture do it for them for irrational fear of….Nothing?

This brings us to the second way that Aperture gives you to manage your original master images. That way is using “referenced masters”. Using referenced masters allows you to put the original master images anywhere you like. The only really good reason to use referenced masters with Aperture is to allow you to use more than one drive to store your images. This is really simple, the interesting part is you don’t have to decide one way or the other. With Aperture you can mix and match both when you import and down the road. For example let’s say you only have one machine and it’s a laptop with one internal drive. You could easily have all of you active projects use managed masters and then use Aperture to relocate them as referenced masters onto an external HD that you leave behind. If you need them active again just use Aperture to consolidate them back into the library if you want. The big thing with Aperture and major difference to Lightroom is that Aperture pretty much abstracts file management from the rest of your work-flow. When you look at your projects and their organizational structure inside of Aperture you have no indication of where your files are, nor do you care. If you want to manage the location of your files there are a couple of functions that allow you to do this but it has nothing to do with the way that you organize your projects or images within Aperture. The important functions are Relocate Masters, Consolidate Masters, and Manage Referenced. Relocate moves your original master images file to wherever you specify, including from managed to referenced. Consolidate takes whatever masters you have selected and moves them from being referenced to being managed back inside the Aperture library, neatly into a corresponding folder to the project that they live in. Last but not least Manage allows you to do a ton of really powerful things like re-hook the images versions to referenced masters when you move them on purpose or by accident somewhere different. I am talking way different because if you just rename the folder they reside in Aperture deals with that automagically.

I have dropped a couple of hints so far about this but here is the deal, there does not have to be any relationship at all between what Aperture project an image lives in and where the corresponding original master image resides on disk. In fact if you wanted to some of the images can be managed masters, some can be referenced from a different HD, and some can be referenced from a DVD if you want. Not only that but you can select what ever images in any combination you want, a whole project, a couple of images in a project, the whole library, etc, and then use the file management functions that I described on that set. You don’t have to do this, you can get involved as much or as little as you would like to in where your images are stored and it has no bearing with how your projects within Aperture are organized.

The reason that I spent so much time on how Aperture does things is because it makes explaining how Lightroom does things really easy. In Lightroom your folder/directory structure is your project structure, end of story. The on disk location of your originals images and how they are divided between folders is the way they are organized in Lightroom. What disk and what folder they are in is in your face and not at all abstracted from you at all. The only thing that you can do is move the folder around as a whole with all of the images in it, even to another HD and then tell Lightroom what you did. The other thing that you can do is move images out of one folder to some other folder and then tell Lightroom where to find them but that changes the way that your project structure in Lightroom is organized. Bottom Line – Aperture original master image location and project structure are completely independent. In Lightroom original master image location is tied directly to project structure and organization. The way that Lightroom works is a very special case of the way Aperture can work.

A coupe of other minor things to note that can be considered file management. Both Lightroom and Aperture generate JPG preview images of RAW files that are imported. The previews allow you to view your images and perform metadata, organization related tasks, slide shows, etc. even when the RAW master files are “off-line”. Previews also help speed some things up in both applications when there is no need to render the RAW file over and over. Aperture gives you a finer degree of control over the size of the previews generated and when they are generated. You can generate them automatically or completely manually with Aperture. You can delete any subset of image previews that you would like. This comes in handy when using a replicated library approach to dealing with a portable version of your library.
For the esoterically oriented Lightroom and Aperture handle things a bit differently when and if you shoot RAW+JPG. When you import RAW+JPG into Aperture it looks like you have only one image, the RAW file. Behind the scenes Aperture is managing both of these files as a sort of compound master images. By default you will be looking at and working on a version of the RAW file. To see the JPG version you will have to right click and choose “new version from master JPG”. In Lightroom the default is to alegidly use the JPG as some sort of preview but I have not seen any indication that this is happening and personally wouldn’t because that would probably be really confusing. Once they are imported into Lightroom it will never show you the JPG again but the image is politely labeled RAW+JPG. The other option in Lightroom is to set a global option to import them as two separate images in a stack.

Whew that was a long one but I thought it deserved to be tackled given how much confusion and misinformation is out there on the subject. My vote in terms of overall file management capability has to go to Aperture for overall flexibility and Lightroom for simplicity. Some photographers just like the comfort level of doing things the same way they always have in terms of organizing their files and like that the location of them is brutally apparent. I like the abstraction of image file location until I really want to be involved with it.

As always let me know if you have any questions or comments.

RB

• Way better organizational capabilities that are not at all tied to the underlying file/directory structure.
• Completely do anything anywhere flexibility, you are not forced into a workflow in any way. If you want to bring up the adjustments HUD and monkey around with the colors while laying out a book, have at it.
• In general a less cluttered and more flexible user interface but this may be a matter of taste.
• Books – Aperture books are really, really, flexible, nice, cool, and, did I say wonderful. Not just the ones printed by Apple or just the templates supplied out of the box but the concept in general. If you take the time to figure Aperture books out you can make some really nice stuff really quick and have just about any service print it up. Too bad that there is virtually no documentation on how to really do advanced book things in Aperture. Almost anything is possible but also almost completely undocumented.
• Stacks, stack mode, compare mode, full screen mode, stack picks, and album picks…..Uhhh if you don’t really know Aperture than this means nothing to you so let’s just say once you figure out how stacking, stack picks, etc work you can improve your productivity by about 1000% if you shoot a lot of images and you need to narrow it down to a few. If you shoot tons of images Aperture shines at streamlining your ability to get through them and end up with the best of the best extremely quickly compared to anything else including LR2
• Customization. You can customize the user interface in ways that suit how you work, what metadata is displayed where, what keys do what, etc, etc, etc.
• Keyword hierarchies once you understand them.

Lightroom 2 pros:

• Local adjustments. No need to bounce your image out to an external editor to do really flexible non-destructive adjustments. Just make sure you have a really powerful machine to keep things speedy. Aperture’s out of the box dodge and burn plug-in is a joke.
• Way better standards support for metadata but still not perfect.
• Better print module, especially the output specific sharpening and the like.
• Adjustment presets.
• Windows (yuck) and Mac OS X.
• Fabulous DNG support (of course) and especially the camera model presets that emulate the manufacturer’s RAW conversion or roll your own with free tools. See my preview here.
• Out of the box more flexible web delivery but only out of the box (if you have tons of time you can make aperture do some amazing stuff but not for most of us)
• Better but not perfect integration with Photoshop CS 3
• Keyword synonyms.
• There are strong and weak points to the adjustment capabilities of both applications but overall I have to say LR2 nudges out Aperture’s adjustments by a hair.

Bottom line – Both applications are fabulous considering that neither of them existed just a few years ago. You can’t really go way wrong with either choice. I have highlighted what I consider to be the strengths of each application. Trying to quantify which application in superior overall for every photographer is pointless. If you are curious about a head to head detailed comparison on any particular feature that is really important to you and your photography shoot me an email or leave a comment and I will be happy to let you know what my experience has been.

RB

Update: Do to a lot of requests on some more detail I have started a series of articles with more detailed comparisons. I will continue to update this as time permits.

Aperture2 vs. Lightroom2 – File Management

Aperture2 vs. Lightroom2 – Stacks

Aperture2 vs. Lightroom2 – Adjustment Presets

Aperture2 vs. Lightroom2 – Keywords

I will speak only from a Nikon shooter’s perspective but if you change the names the same kind of thing is true no matter what you happen to shoot. Once upon a time if you wanted your RAW processing to look like the JPGs produced by your camera with various in camera settings you really needed to use Nikon Capture, not a pretty piece of software but getting much better over the years. Still it is backwards and cumbersome compared to Aperture or Lightroom. With Adobe’s release of Lightroom2 in combination with ACR 4.5 and the beta of DNG camera profiles plus profiling software this is not true anymore.

I just got done downloading and doing a quick compare of Lightroom2 RAW conversions using the new DNG camera profiles versus Nikon Capture NX2 RAW conversions with “picture control” settings with the same names and could not believe my eyes with respect to how close the conversions are. This is friggin’ great if you happen to like the RAW conversions and in camera produced JPGs that your camera happens to make and want to use them as a starting point. Huge time saver compared to starting with the same old flat RAW conversion that Aperture makes and then tweaking it from there. This tweaking usually takes multiple adjustment blocks and is not quite the same for every single image (probably due to white balance). What’s more is that Adobe has a free DNG camera profile editor and instructions on how to make your own camera profiles. This is totally great if you like to do that sort of thing or happen to shoot RAW with a camera that happens not to be a Nikon or Canon, you are now not out in the cold anymore. I can imagine that some dedicated non Canon/Nikon shooters out there will produce a bunch of profiles for their companions, if not do it yourself.

You can find the new tools here <——. I did a really quick comparison on the Nikon profiles for a D200 verses NX2. Check it out here <—–. The captions under the images represent the software and profile or Nikon “picture control” name for the conversion. For beta software I really think that it’s amazing. If you are a RAW shooter and are still using the clunky camera manufacturer’s software because of the RAW tone curve and color characteristics you may want to rethink that or at least try it out for yourself. I know what you are thinking – ‘DNG conversions and all are a pain’ but guess what, you don’t have to do anything, the camera profiles work without converting your native NEF’s or CR2′s or whatever, they just work.

There are plenty of things I really love about Aperture compared to other products but the brilliant implementation of local adjustments, keyword synonyms, truly useful output sharpening, and now camera RAW profiles are starting to make the grass look greener and much more saturated over there on the Lightroom2 side of the fence.

RB