The ugly side of taking so many photos.
Apple Aperture is a stinking pile of poo.
To be fair, it’s a stinking pile of poo because my Mac only has one processor and it’s not the beefiest of processors to boot. It also doesn’t have a great graphics card. Even so, Aperture is really a lot of poo.
I installed the trial because I need a DAM solution, and I’d heard good things about Aperture’s management of offline files. To be a bit more explicit I have tens of thousands of large photo files. I don’t keep them on my hard drive, I back them up to DVD. Now when I want to go back and get at some of those photos, I need to know where they are. The discs are labeled with date ranges, but that doesn’t help much. I don’t have a photographic memory. So what I need is a piece of software that can store small versions of all my photos so I can browse through, find the disc they’re on, put it in, and pull them up.
It doesn’t really sound like much to ask. Well, apparently it is.
There’s a number of software packages that do this; at least they claim to do this. Apple’s iPhoto would actually be a better solution for me, because I don’t need any more photo editing tools. I tried iPhoto, the new version supports offline files similar to the way I want, but it has some bugs and acts clunky so it can’t do the job I need.
I bought some software last year specifically for this task, it was called Qpict. Seemed like a saviour, but it was just a tease. It actually has exactly the features I want, but silly me, I updated to the latest version and it broke. I can no longer look at my library. This is of course after I had indexed and tagged 22 some odd dvds, no small amount of time. Qpict support has yet to solve my problem, actually they don’t even respond to my emails. The software would be really great, if it worked, or if it was supported.
But back to Aperture. I downloaded the trial, imported my dvds (which took forever,) and now I’m trying to browse the library. It chokes. It hasn’t even made thumbnails of everything yet. Qpict did this in a matter of minutes (per dvd), iPhoto as well. I’m not sure what the deal is here. This is almost completely unuseable. I have better than the minimum requirements, but uh… I guess those are exaggerated.
So now I’m trying something called iView, and it SEEMS perfect. It’s $120 through Amazon, so I’m considering buying it. I’m going to play with the trial a few more days and see if I can break it. These guys are a larger company so I think they’ll be able to support the product properly. They also have a user community so I’m likely to be able to get help there if I need it.
– Update –
The good folks at Qpict did refund me in full, as well as offer me the next version of their pro software for free. While I still have a problem with how they handled the issue initially, I understand that I was a strange exception and not a high priority. They made a nice gesture as apology so there’s no hard feelings. Their new software looks like a great solution for me and many others.
Comment by Aidan L — December 5, 2006 @ 12:37 pm
I don’t have thousands of pictures but I have a few hundred and I know it can take a while to import and the amount you have it must take forever, I feel for you! I am pleased you have managed to find a program which appears to be working. I always think when you find something that works, despite the price, which for me is about £60 it is worth buying. I suppose £60 isn’t a huge amount in terms of software although $120 is $120 at the end of the day. I don’t actually know how much similar programs cost but if it’s more expensive than the norm I still think it would be worth paying for it, especially if it works.
Good luck with it, I hope it works as you want it to!