It’s been a long time coming; may be too long. Yet I’ve downloaded the trial version to try it out. While I did start using Lightroom a couple of months ago, I have yet to migrate all my pictures. A daunting task. One that I prefer not to do. Returning to Aperture would avoid this.
First and foremost the new version supports my camera, the Panasonic DMC-G1. There are some functional changes that have been made to Aperture as well, including non-dstructive brushes, which put it on at least a par with the current version of Lightroom.
The face-detaction feature has been quite interesting. It’s quite remarkable how well it performs. It’s not to say it is 100%, but still, possibly the most important thing to index is the names of people in the image yet it’s so easy to miss one person or just get lazy and not index the names at all.
Going through my old photographs has been a challenge. Most of these are “people” pictures. Going through each picture, identifying the people and then manually indexing is time consuming and error prone. With face detection Aperture has been able to go through this archive, detect pictures with faces and present suggestions. Quite a labour/time saving feature. It uses a learning algorithm so after indexing a few shots of an individual it is able to identify the individual in other shots. So rather than manually key wording the images, Aperture presents a list and asks for confirmation.
As well, it is quite good at picking out faces from poor quality images and making correct suggestions.
In this picture Aperture correctly identified my great grandmother in the wedding picture of my grandparent. A shot including some twenty other people.
Hard to say if face detection is a compelling enough reason to return. But indexing pictures is a time consuming component of the workflow and anything that can be done to reduce it has value.
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