For several months I've been playing around with Adobe's Lightroom and Apple's Aperture, both powerful Mac photo management applications. (I believe that free trials are available. Lightroom also does Windows.) Since the learning curve for each is steep, I had, at some point, to decide which way to go and then devote the time to learning one program.

Lightroom's strong point is it's outstanding image processing ability and it's weak point is its very confusing (but presumably capable) cataloging. Aperture on the other hand does cataloging and organizing simply and powerfully. Its image processing, although not as good as Lightroom, is still very good. With over 40,000 images spread across multiple computers, I need more than anything --organization. So Aperture is was.

The first step then was to soup up my system to handle the requirements with room to spare. That included an added 400 gigs of storage, another gig of RAM and a video card update to my old G5 dual 2.0.

Then I spent a week consolidating and importing images into Aperture. Even with the hardware upgrades, managing that many images and sorting/displaying thousands of thumbnails at a time strains the system. But now I can sort my original un-edited digital negatives from the many second, third and fourth generation edits. That's huge for me.

Image processing in Aperture is non-destructive. The original image remains untouched even if you crop, remove red-eye, or change the tone. The program records and stores a log of the steps you took, and at any time you can go back to the original or to any point in the process, picking and choosing which changes you want to keep. This is important in that you always have the digital negative to go back to and because you don't have to store multiple versions of the same photo on the hard drive for every change you make (which is how I came to have over 40,000 images.)

And if you need to do some destructive editing, the program is well integrated with Photoshop (strangely better than Lightroom from my experience) sending an image off for editing and then bringing it back in with the changes.

So, here are a few images I found this morning while browsing. I'll be learning more about the program as I go. I don't think it will make me a better photographer but at least I'll be an organized one.

Christian Science Center, Spring 06

Sari shop in Singapore, Spring 06

Antique Savannah GA police car, Spring 06