Forums | MacLife

I used Aperture from 1.0 to 1.5, and on my Power Mac Quad 2.5, 6.5 GB RAM, it was occasionally buggy and horrendously, painfully slow; even working with small albums (small being about 75 photos), using stacks was sluggish, and making adjustments was just unbearable.

I heard that Aperture 2.0 is improved, but not by much; according to someone on CNET who has the same model G5 I do, 2.0 is slightly faster, but they had much more success with Lightroom.

So, I gave the demo of Lightroom a try, transferring my entire (just over 90 gig) photo library into Lightroom (which was quite a chore, seeing as how I didn't know that you could export the original ('master') photo from Aperture). Simply put, it was a breath of fresh air. It felt about 5x faster than Aperture (external editing and image adjustments were just about instantaneous), had a more thoughtful and intuitive (albeit different) interface, more customization, more features, generally a much better program. I was sold after three days.

Now, don't get me wrong, Lightroom isn't a perfect program: there are two or three things that irk me about it, the main one being that stacks aren't universal; they don't show up in collections (called albums in Aperture) or under the metadata browser. However, this is a tiny setback considering how horrendously slow Aperture was on my G5.

All things being equal though, I would recommend Lightroom over Aperture any day; I used Aperture for years, and as I said, Lightroom was a breath of fresh air. It's probably faster on Mac Pros (though I don't know by how much), but if you've got a MacBook, you're out of luck for Aperture; it requires at least a MacBook Pro, and according to another reviewer on CNET, Lightroom was fairly snappy on their regular MacBook.

Both Lightroom and Aperture have demos available; I suggest you download and try both of them before making a decision.

I use Aperture extensively.  My photo db is over 220GB.  All in Aperture 2.1.  Aperture has reduced my use of Photoshop CS3 by about 90% and is therefore a much faster program to use then Adobe's Lightroom which has very limited editing tools.  I only go into CS3 for actual photo editing and almost never for cropping, lighting, color adjustments or any other simple adjustments.  Aperture is slow when I load a project with thousands of photos, but that's to be expected.  Projects of just 100 or 200 photos is fast.  I'm using a PowerPC Quad processor with max'd out memory, which is a minimum machine for serious photo work today.

CS3 is big and bulky, and very slow.  I don't like it, but I use it when I must.  Don't get me wrong, it's a great and very powerful tool, but Aperture saves me a lot of time and lets me concentrate on the pictures not on the computer work.  I'm not a graphic artist, I'm a photographer.