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.