"Zen and the Art of Aperture"

Creativepro.com has a feature up (has had since early March, actually) about how Aperture has some benefits that have been largely overlooked by the photo editing community:

Many users and reviewers have complained that this library architecture makes Aperture inflexible when working with other apps in a more complicated workflow. I recently had an epiphany that made me believe those complaints aren't just invalid, they're born of ignorance.

It's a fairly long and complete feature that deals with some of the percieved shortcomings in Aperture and how the author Ben Long thinks they might not be disadvantages after all.

Personally, I think his defense of Aperture's "appliance" style photo management is a little off:

Right out of the box, Aperture provides an excellent import facility and good backup and archiving tools. These tools handle the bulk of your housekeeping chores. Many people are paranoid about the long-term implications of putting things in Aperture's library, but it's actually a very open system that lets you extract original images at any time, so there's no need for extra archiving or backup tasks. If you want to back up your images, just tell Aperture to do it.

He's right; I'm paranoid about the long-term implications of putting things in Aperture's library. It's a great system so long as I'm using Aperture, but no matter how you paint it, a setup like that is a clever tool to lock the user in to a certain system.

Yes, you can export original images, but I wonder if that's kind of like the way you can burn CDs with the music you buy fron the iTunes store if you don't like the DRM.

Regardless, it's a good feature, especially if you're looking for ways to expand or refine your Aperture workflow.

Comments

[Fazal Majid]

I don't buy the argument at all. Aperture doesn't have to copy the files, it could just create hard links and leave the files where they are, as Lightroom gives you the option to. Spotlight is another way to manage your files outside the hierarchical filesystem model, but Spotlight doesn't insist on duplicating every file it indexes.

Aperture is not an appliance for photos, it is a roach motel.