Aperture versus Lightroom

A friend of mine had recommended Aperture 3.0 for managing digital photography. I downloaded a trial version of the latest release, Aperture 3.0.2, and gave it a workout on a small collection of photos last week.

The bottom line? Way too buggy for me. Although there are many things to like about Aperture there are issues with memory leaks, frequent crashes and hit and miss performance. The application shut down multiple times on basic image operations and despite running on a brand new, high-end iMac, the “processing” icon was constantly active and slowing the experience down.

With an extensive digital photography collection already being managed by Lightroom and a new release of Lightroom on the horizon, I do not see a need for me to make a switch. Still, I was quite surprised at how fragile Aperture was in the trail version. After the first few crashes, I was always expecting it to fail again at some point. And it did.

It is now off the machine.