Aperture 3 hanging... and hanging... and chewing...

Aperture 3 needs to be tuned up. As detailed below, with great work I have been able to import my (100,000+ library), however even now it still stumbled on basic tasks.

In general I vastly prefer Aperture to Lightroom. Aperture in general is the fastest at displaying thumbnails and maneuvering between hundreds of photos in a project and between hundreds of projects. Lightroom is comparatively slow rendering of thumbnails, and these thumbnails seem to need to be regenerated.

I have been waiting for A3 but it is, as you we all know, been a real ordeal to import photos. The program is excruciatingly slow.

Now to clarify: I am NOT migrating from A2. I started fresh. Specs are fine. I work on a 4GB iMac24" with 150 GB spare on the hard disk. Now I will admit that my photo library is huge, 150,000+ photos. However, I am only importing referenced files and I am not generating previews of these imported photos. Finally, given the now legendary problems with faces and places, these features are turned off. In short, I am asking A3 to do the minimum amount of lifting when it comes to importing. Still, this is apparently a daunting task for the program. What Aperture 2 could handle easily, appears to stymie A3.

I tried multiple times to import ALL photo collection folders at once. This hung up the computer for days, on each attempt. The program was continually "processing" Now photos were getting processed, but only bit by bit and it was bogging down all aspects of computer function. I deleted the aperture library and began importing afresh over and over, but with the same result. I ultimately resorted to importing photo libraries and sub-libraries by years. I would import folder YEAR 2008 over one evening, and A3 handled it. The next evening I imported YEAR 2007, and A3 handled it. I successively moved in this step-wise fashion and was able to import all of my photos.

Once imported, the program works REASONABLY well, but it is still buggy. For instance, opening up the keyword menu palate (Shift D) and then typing in a keyword not listed in the palate, pulls up a drop-down menu of suggested keywords. This drop-down menu, however, then stays open and no manner of activity or toggling will collapse it. Another bug, I edit my photos in photoshop 3. A3 now recognizes PS3, and in theory and will open a photo for editing directly in PS3, however this approach hangs up the program. Editing levels within A3 also seems to hang-up the program. Accordingly, to edit I "show each photo in finder" and then jump to PS3 from the finder. This is an unnecessary step, but it avoids the random behavior of A3 which more often then not will hang or slog through as if I had asked it to reverse sort the Yellow Pages.

All and all, the program remains swift at displaying photos. And as I said, I have a lot. It is robust in allowing for keywords. But now it is in most other respects boggy, slow, and given to piques of hanging-up. This needs to be cleaned-up.

Given the unbelievable hassle it has been just to import large numbers of photos, I am not willing to hazard faces again. This is an exciting feature, but when applied to more than 100 photos (and I have 100,000) to kills the system. It zaps all free processing power, and then takes 2 days to process 100 faces out of countless more photos. Unfortunately, you do not provide for selective application of faces. You need it.

Alternatively, if Faces cannot be applied in a vacuum, in that it needs to draw upon its past facial lessons, you need to at least allow users to feed additional libraries to it bit by bit. This way, if I have folders A through Z, it could at least use the lessons from A to more quickly and efficiently attack B, and then the lessons from A and B to attack the next folder fed to it, C. Forcing (or allowing) faces to attack in an undifferentiated, unstructured fashion all 100,000 photos is ludicrous. Also, allowing the user to apply faces incrementally rather than pell-mell, allows the user to know that there will be an end-point. If I let faces loose on 10 projects with 1000 photos rather than 100 projects with 10000 photo, I can estimate that the program will be done with its assignment in 24 hours as apposed…forever? never with the larger batch.

I am trolling the support boards and the google news for word of a corrected A3. Apple unfortunately tend to maintain radio silence. Some acknowledgement of the problem and planned solutions would be nice. Even nicer would be a revised program.

The "faces" feature works great in iPhoto and allows you to incrementally add faces. It is not nearly so troubling to apply faces to photos. I haven't tried applying faces to thousands of images, though, and wonder if that would slow down iPhoto. I use iPhoto on my laptop to show my photos to people, rather than keeping a huge Aperture library on that computer. I use Aperture on the laptop to edit photos, but I export the projects and import them to another library I keep on an external drive at home, so that I don't overwhelm my 320GB drive in my MacBook Pro. Once I've exported to the other library, I then delete the project from my laptop. I am still waiting for Apple to come up with a solution to the current issues before I dare attempt to open the other library with A3, since that library is much much bigger than the one I keep on my laptop.

Aperture 3 update (32MBs) is now available via Software Update, addressing numerous issues. Just installing it now...

Yes!!!

With A3 update applied, it was able to process all 9000+ previews successfully. It did seem to hang on one file for about 8-10 minutes (CPU at ~102 percent), which must have been a photo with many brush stroke edits applied.

But it persevered and got through this preview to finish the rest (averaging about 1 per second).

And overall performance seems a bit better, with interactions more snappy.

I am a very happy camper...Thank you for this update :o)

Message was edited by: mrthink

Yay! A3.0.1 seems to have fixed my problems with poor performance, I can finally view my photos with lots of retouches with out the computer grinding to a halt :-D

Finally, finally, finally, finally!!! Wow - so many fixes, no wonder they took so long. I only wish Apple would abandon the idea of remaining silent when they know there is an issue they're working on. At least let us know, and not have us looking for crazy solutions because we don't know how long its going to take.

I know many companies try to remain silent as long as they can so that the media doesn't have a ball with them (Toyota anyone?). And Apple does that a lot. Smart management?, perhaps. Good customer service?, I doubt it.

If this were a MS application that was released in this state, the news would be on every tv station about how buggy and unreliable MS products are. I am amazed that Apple would release a product that (appears to) had such little QA prior to being released. It looks like they just made the final build and put it in a box w/o any testing.

I think it would be a GREAT idea to mark this thread answered (being mostly answered for you personally) and then we can start new threads fresh for new issues, or old ones that are still hanging around.

Ugh... I guess I'm one of those with worse problems now. I really, REALLY hoped the 3.0.1 patch would fix everything, but no... For some reason, after the update, Aperture would only start in the 32-bit mode. Get Info didn't provide me with a means to get out of it. I called Apple Support, and per their instructions, I booted up my iMac in the safe mode, did a restart, and the 32-bit selection appeared in Get Info. After de-selecting it, everything went to H**L fast. It would hang up on Faces and thumbnail processing, and then, occasionally, the beach ball of death. I uninstalled Aperture 3.0.1 (with appzap) and reinstalled 2.1.4 with my photo files (Time Machine), and tried again. No luck. Processing would hang with only a few items to go, etc. I've got a call into Apple Support again in hopes that this can be resolved. Dang.

Once bitten, twice shy.

I'm going to wait a few days to a week in order to see how 3.0.1 works for folks.

Has anyone tried opening a slideshow that was imported from iPhoto? Using 3.0.1 it still hangs, the only way out is to Force Quit and on reopening quickly click on another folder or album. Yes, I have installed the slideshow update of several days ago!

Since this topic has been marked answered, and deals with dozens of different problems, I suggest starting new topic threads from here on so we can focus more on specific solutions.

Rob

Bought A3 installed. No problems what so ever. Been using all features including the Faces.