zerolight

That’s how many photos I purged from my libraries (deliberately) over the past few days. Either I’ve taken a lot less photo’s in the past 2 years, or my photography skills have significantly improved, but of the 2000 deletions, 200 were from the past 2 years, with the other 1800 from the previous 3 years. It’s amazing how much crap I kept. Blurry photos, Poor photos, Duplicates, I was just too lazy to throw out the duffers at the time, instead just archiving everything with a do-it-tomorrow attitude. Still, I can’t help but wonder if I’ve thrown away too many. EEK.

Over the course of this process I spent quite a bit of time with both Aperture and Lightroom. I can tell you that Aperture was less painful, and far quicker to use for this type of task. Of the 1500 odd photos left in my library, the majority benefited from straightening and cropping. I probably used some of the other tools in Aperture and Lightroom to enhance about 10% of those photographs. I’ve grown to really like Aperture by the way. Anyway, job done. Well, almost. I still have to work through that 1500+ photos in iPhoto and tag them all to make navigating them easier, then clean up my online gallery.

I’m thinking of using Aperture to clean out my photo library. Whilst Aperture brings little more to the table in terms of image editing (it does have a few very useful features, white balance and edge sharpening being two) and library management than iPhoto, it does have an ace up it’s sleeve. I’m talking about workflow.

If you want to run through thousands of photo’s in iPhoto, selecting some for deletion, some for tweaking, and some to be left as is, you quickly find that it’s a slow process in iPhoto (or pretty much any other photo management application). Aperture, from the limited time I’ve had with it, speeds up this process significantly. Tagging files as keepers, rotating images, and so on is a one click process. I think I can probably spend a couple of hrs with Aperture and manage to weed out the dross from my collection. I’ll then export what’s left and import into a fresh iPhoto gallery for general viewing. Whether I’ll bother to clean up images during this process I do not know, but I’d like to think I’ll pass any new images through Aperture before importing them into iPhoto.

The only reason I’d have for not using Aperture as the primary image library is that there’s no simple one click export to Menalto Gallery, a function I already have in iPhoto. Interestingly there is an option to export to flickr. Perhaps I should consider migrating to flickr, a service I’ve never really been keen on? Ian and Roy certainly love it.

I’ve never really understood “community” photo sites like flickr, and have long since deserted pbase (which I assume inspired flickr) in favour of Gallery G2. I’ve no interest in the community side of things, my photo’s being primarily for friends and family. As such, the only way you can view my photos is by my site. You have to want to view them, rather than by being a virtual voyeur / stalker on the flickr site. I much prefer to host my own photos, making use of the mammoth storage space that ace-host provide.

Offline I use iPhoto to organise my photos. This is Apples photo management equivalent to iTunes and comes complete with albums (which behave like playlists – both dynamic and static), image tagging, and so on. Basically if it’s in iTunes, there’s an equivalent in iPhoto. The only thing that’s been lacking has been a way to link my offline photo gallery to my online gallery.

Now there’s iPhoto to Gallery. The voyeurs amongst you will be happy to know there’s an equivalent for flickr. This little plugin doesn’t track which photo’s in your offline gallery are in which online gallery (there’s a nice feature for the future, perhaps?) What it does do is eliminate some of the work normally required in order to upload photos to G2. Simply highlight the photos you require in iPhoto, choose export, and then instead of exporting to your desktop for use in a 3rd party application, you export directly into your online gallery.