I've been exclusively using Aperture for about 6 months now, and absolutely love it. The non-destructive edits are liberating. The RAW support is fantastic. The workflow stuff is great. Vaults? Great. Loupe on RAW images? Perfection.
But, of course, I've got some gripes.
- It's hard to copy individual photos between computers. If I have Aperture on a desktop and a laptop, and I want to copy just a handful of photos and their metadata (stars, keywords, etc...) from the desktop to the laptop, I have 2 choices:
- create a new Project to contain these selected images, then export/import it. This would make me organize my photos according to which sets I want to move between computers, with no semantics retained.
- export the Masters for the selected photos from the desktop, copy them to the laptop (USB thumbdrive, sftp, whatever...) and import them as new photos. All non-EXIF metadata is lost, and has to be manually re-entered.
But Aperture already has an "export metadata" option... Why not let me export just a selected set of photos (masters and versions) as well as their associated metadata, in a format that can be ingested into another Aperture without manual intervention or redundant/meaningless Projects used as interchange vectors?
- No keyword tag cloud. I've got a BUNCH of keywords, but the keyword viewer (i.e., searching) is kinda sucky for that. I want a nice tag cloud.
- Performance on my quad-G5 (with stock video card) is rather craptastic. If I disable the second display view, it's marginally better, but it's generally a dog on this box. It's much faster on my MacBook Pro. I'd love it to run a bit better on the quad...
- Albums sometimes forget their designated sort order. I use a "general" project, and it's got a couple thousand images in it by now. Half the time, it decides to ignore my "newest first" sort order and show photos in "oldest first". It's kind of nice, to be occasionally reminded of the first photos I shot using Aperture, but it's not how I told the album to be sorted. One additional click of the sort triangle, followed by a 2 second wait as the 2000 photos are reordered...