A powerful and somewhat elegant (and sharp) UI built on a foundation of flimsy playing cards. Verdict: weak sauce.

Yes, you read right. Apple makes it, and I think it sucks. Don't get me wrong, iPhoto sucks worse, but Aperture still sucks pretty hard.

My longest-standing complaint and something that I doubt Apple will ever change. It's the primary thing that has always kept me away. At the heart of any such program is its organization and management capabilities. Aperture allows you the use of only a virtual system of containers (you can never get a representation of your file system in the UI). To make matters worse, you cannot organize your photos to mimic the file system either. That's because Apple uses three incompatible "containers" to manage photos. Projects, Albums and Folders. You can nest folders, but they can't contain photos. You can put photos in projects, but they can't be nested. You can put photos in albums, but only if they're already in a project.

This is complete lunacy and makes what could be so simple, so very convoluted and unworkable. All they needed was one type of container and then let you do whatever the hell you want with it. Like Lightroom does.

You can't set a preference to always import by reference (or copy and then reference). It supports this feature, but if you forget to use the right setting or you happen to drag and drop, you'll end up with content in the Aperture library instead.

You can't import, sub-folders through the import UI. Fail in a big way. So if you've used any other software to manage your photos, or even if you've simply kept them organized in folders yourself, you're going to rip your hair out trying to get them into Aperture because the Import feature requires you to drill down to the last folder containing images. That means one folder at a time. I have hundreds.

Tying some of these together... On import you can have Aperture copy your photos to a specific location and then create sub-folders by year/month/day. Now let's say you accidentally trash your Aperture library and want to put all these photos back into Aperture? Oops, we're back at the issue where you can't import sun-folders and have to go through them all one at a time.

Now, Adobe has a crap-looking UI, but at least they got the very basic level of management and organization done right.

At this point I can only see using Aperture for doing one-off or sngle-project editing. It can't serve as a repository for someone with a large photo collection, IMO.

Now if only Lightroom would run half as fast as Google Picasa without requiring a damn supercomputer.

I've got half a mind to try switching to Bibble 5 Pro, just because I know the guys writing it are absolute performance freaks.

Bibble is umm... Atrocious looking, so it's totally out of the running for me. Likewise, I really like some of the features in LightZone, but its asset management sucks and it's got way too many bugs.

To be sure, this type of product is a large development effort. Even doing just one of the components right can be a big undertaking. It's just a shame that none of these guys have put it all together as well as they could have because they've definitely spent the time and money to get this far.

You can tell right away from the BIbble and LightZone web sites that thhe products are going to be lacking. Especially with the LightZone they've gone completely the opposite direction one should go in when trying to sell something that's graphics oriented. Their web site is almost all text. I'm sorry, but you're not going to sell shit that way.

I would go as far as saying Lightroom is almost 50% of my living, the other 50% is taking pictures. I hardly use photoshop now as lightroom is able to do most things I need, I love it!

I tried earlier versions of Aperture and hated it, I don't know of one single professional photographer who uses it, I'm sure they are out there but I have never met them.

I don't care about how it looks, nothing can beat Lightroom in what it does, just like Photoshop to be honest. If they could improve anything I'd like a better way of passing images between the 2 programs, but that's about it.

Cheers

Cris.

I don't like that Lightroom's Develop Module is separate from its Library. That really bugs me.

All my Photos are in Lightroom, but apart from the asset management, I can't really think of anything it does that you can't also do in Aperture, albeit in perhaps a different manner. I do recall a few things in Aperture having odd UI however, such as cropping.

Nice additions to Aperture 3 include brushes, mapping integration and face recognition. I'd like to see the last two added to Lightroom. Aperture's method of grabbing GPS information from an imported track looks positively stupid however. You have to drag at least one photo manually to the position on the map at which it was taken. Then it figures out how to place the others. Not sure why you can't just drag it anywhere onto your track and then have the program use only the timestamps for matching all of them.

I'd also really love to see masking abilities in Lightroom similar to how they're implemented in Lightzone. That feature simply rocks for making lighting adjustments in your photographs. Brushes simply don't compare.

eh- I just use IrfanView.
Seems all I ever need to do is crop something or change size or resolution.

/not a photographer

I used to use ACDSee when I ran Windows as a desktop OS, however it was primarily a viewer. Only in more recent versions have they turned it into any sort of asset management app. I recall Irfanview being popular with some folks, but honestly, with that web site I would never even have tried downloading it to see if it was any good.

Lightroom++

So I guess i want the Lightroom user interface, which does the job just fine for me, but I want the Bibble backend, which is screaming fast and apparently generates very good results if you stare up close at the pixels.

Adobe has never been known for writing fast programs. They usually ignore industry advances in hardware acceleration completely, and to make supporting multiple platforms easier, all their software is written on top of their own development layer, further slowing things down. If they were to write some native code for each platform I'm sure they could improve the speed of their software. Instead, like many other developers (unfortunately) they instead rely on the general purpose hardware advancements of the computer industry - CPU, buses, memory.

That's why Photoshop or Illustrator today, on a screaming fast multi-core machine doesn't feel much faster than it did back in the day on a Pentium 90. With regards to Lightroom, based on the sheer megapixel count of the images now in common use, it would be unfeasible to run on such older hardware, even with a tremendous amount of optimizing.

Scrolling through the grid view and seeing mostly pixelated image representations is a little saddening on a Core2Duo at 2.9GHz with a very fast graphics processor.

The Lightroom 3 Beta has been quite fast for me compared to LR2.

They're also making huge performance based improvements in CS5, especially for After Effects and Premiere Pro.

Great to hear about speed increases in LR3. I also like some of the refinement/streamlining they've done with the UI, but I feel there should be a lot more to show for a full version number. I'd love to see some new functionality/features, though I won't hold my breath. Maybe with Aperture 3 adding some new capabilities Adobe will be persuaded to at least try and match them.

Oh, just recalled something else I'd like to see in Lightroom. The ability to write some metadata back directly to a RAW file as opposed to only storing it in a sidecar file.