Aperture 3 - Scandalous release

Why should I spend hours in discussion groups? Why do I need expert programming advice?

When I buy an iPhone, should I expect a week of issues before I carry on a conversation? Is this a foreshadowing of the iPad?

You apologists seem to be in denial, Apple has royally screwed up. Why should it be a roll of the dice when I buy or upgrade a professional level software program? My time is valuable. It isn't to be used in arcane tweaks and adjustments. The days of the KayPro are long gone.

I buy it, install it and it works. In a competitive world, that's my expectation. It is also my customers' expectations when they buy my products. That seems to be a foreign concept to Apple's engineers.

I am responsible for systems in a very large corporation. This, in my world, would be the last time this vendor walked in the door. It also means I don't need to be lectured by posters here about my inability to ask for advice or my overinflated expectations that something should work when installed.

Installed first time and have been using it pretty hard for almost a week. No problems here and I have used almost all of the editing tools.

I am lovin it. It is strange that it works fine for some of us and for others....not.

I have a 815GB library, 462 projects and have been updating now for the last couple of days. I don't expect this update to happen quickly. I have been importing for about 18 hours now and am up to project 167 of 462.
The first time I tried to update the system died and it froze when left overnight. I tried this by doing the upgrade via the Aperture dialogue box and learnt this was not the best way. So what I did was to create a new Aperture library, opened it, removed *** Faces and anything else I thought would slow the process.
I then imported the Aperture 2 library which I had already moved to a different drive(for space reasons).

This is where I am at now.
Before upgrading I tried as best to ensure my library was corruption free by the methods stated above.
This is a painfully slow upgrade, but I understand there is a lot to do in the background.

I had also read you can pause the task and re-boot your machine, this makes the process quicker. I did not want to try this now for fear that it will start the process all over again. Any suggestions?

BTW I also run with Lightroom 2/3 beta and think it is a great programme, but not without its issues.

There is some great instructions and information at www.apertureexpert.com

Hardly trolling, actually hoping someone would point out that I am wrong and that the functions I'm missing are actually there--can you select a part of an image? Is there a way to easily save-as the image?

Cheers

Your attitude and condescending remarks to people voicing honest frustrations are of no value to anyone here other than helping to inflate an already inflated ego.

I'm glad your version of Aperture worked for you, I'm sure it had nothing to do with Apple's engineering, but solely because of your superior insights and technical ability.

I've seen your type in thousands of forums on as many subjects over many years. You are counterproductive and boring.

I am hating Apple at this moment. As a Pro photographer, I expect Pro applications.
Aperture 3 is by far the worst upgrade ever. Between countless hours upgrading a 600GB library with 85,000 photos, the database somehow got corrupted and I had to get the time machine backup to replace it, which took another 6 hours... The performance was pitiful so I re-generated the previews and believe it or not, it took 16 hours!!!!
After everything was upgraded, the performance still *****. Even doing small adjustments, shows the processing message and the image gets jagged for a second and then cleans up. It was Real time in Aperture 2!
Looking at the Activity monitor, Importing about 600 images from a CF Card was somewhat the same speed as it was in v2.0 but then comes the snail-slow processing of the images which takes over 15 minutes... And taking a look at the Activity Monitor, Aperture renders the whole computer unusable, taking up to from 200% to 300% of the CPU!
Unacceptable!!!!!!!!
I am calling Apple tomorrow to complain... This is not Pro, this is BS... All those videos they show online with the real time processing are fake. They are probably working on small jpgs... Try feeding 600 16MP Canon 1D Mark IV Raw+JPG files to a library of 85,000 photos and Aperture can't keep up.
Very disappointed.

I have to agree -- this is what I would expect from an early beta release, not a shipping product. I am not a professional photographer. I do not have hundreds of gigabytes of photos. In fact, I have never even used any prior versions of Aperture, so I decided to start from scratch and import a handful of photos into my Aperture 3 trial directly from the filesystem. The import was fine, but performing even minor adjustments to my photos caused massive beachballing and I have repeatedly had to force quit the program. I am running a 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo iMac with 4 GB RAM, which you'd think would be enough for something as simple as cropping a photo -- but the most recent photo I tried to crop ended up turning my machine into a quivering mess for nearly 10 minutes. Looking in Aperture's activity monitor, it looks like it keeps trying to "generate thumbnails" after even the tiniest little adjustments that I make. This pegs the CPU, for reasons unknown to me, and I am a software engineer by profession. If I had released a product like this to paying customers, I would be fired. Unless Apple releases a significant patch to fix these problems within the next 30 days, I certainly won't be purchasing Aperture when my free trial runs out. No way am I paying $200 for software that doesn't work.

Yep 4 days worth of problems but after troubleshooting this is what I came up with:

After upgrading Aperture to version 3.0 to include migrating the entire library at the same time, it began processing the photos (about 8900). Most have seen slow downs during the process. The computer RAM is taxed and during the process and it hangs on certain files during the process. After a lot of trial and error I found out if you have done major edits on certain photos (i.e. scanned old B/W with major repairs) then it may CRASH the whole process causing it to freeze and/or shutdown unexpectedly.

Suggestions:
1. First time machine back-up everything before the upgrade.
2. Create a desktop folder and label it something like Photo projects.
3. In Aperture 2 Export each individual project and place them into that folder in the desktop.
4. Next move the Aperture Library located in the PICTURES folder somewhere else for example "the TRASH Can" but do not empty it!
5. Initiate the Upgrade to 3.0 and late in the process it will ask if you where the Aperture Library is, you need to choose the option to "CREATE" a new library.
6. Once Aperture 3 is open go to FILE menu and Import "Project/Library". You are going to import the files you put in the folder on the desktop. You can do one at a time or select more. I suggest a few at time. After each import then allow it to finish the process then import/process the next project or more. After each import and process is finished Aperture 3 should work fluidly and with decent speed. If you have problems along the way you can troubleshoot it be deleting one project at a time upon relaunching Aperture quickly "Select" the project, go to the file menu and hit "Delete Project". If it stops freezing afterwords and relaunches with issue, the problem was due to a photo(s) in that project. If you are confident that everything is finally working upon completion you may delete the old library you moved elsewhere or save it on another hard drive as a last effort backup.

I hope this helps. P

I think there have been some valuable suggestions here that those who are livid should heed before going off the beam.
1. If you are dealing with important databases, always proceed with caution and a backup.
2. Make sure your libraries are in good clean shape by rebuilding with AP2 and don't have a maxed out hard drive.
3. If you are expecting no bugs in a huge new release you are from some outer plant like Ur......
4. If you don't know all the details of how to control the program, such as setting the thumbnail size, auto generate previews, and think in the beginning you can expect it all to work perfectly, think again.

It's good you came here to vent, as you're not going to get to the root of the problems with your attitude.

My Aperture 3 upgrade is somewhere in transit. I doubt I'm going to install it for a good long time.

Apples catalog lists Aperture as a "Pro" application; from what I see here the support for Aperture is anything but "Pro".

I can't believe the number of responses I'm seeing that include multiple DAYS of unsuccessful upgrade activity, wasted time that could have been saved and made more understandable and predictable by a database consistency check before starting conversion activity, and some auto recommendations to reduce the scope of the conversion for large databases and slower processors.

The user community has been forced into developing the troubleshooting and preparation recommendations that Apple should have provided as the vendor, and built into the upgrade SW.

It sounds like a product test cycle with real user files has been missed, badly skimped on, or the findings were ignored.

Message was edited by: ericnepean

FIXED!!

I had nothing but problems initially. Beachball of death. Computer frozen. I tried several times and the same problems happened until...

I used Aperture 2 to check for library consistencies and also had it rebuild the library. After that, Aperture 3 upgraded my library with no issues.

I then had Aperture 3 check for consistencies and also had it rebuild the library. I have now been using Aperture 3 like crazy for several days and I am amazed.

Once this program has a healthy library to work with it is blazing. It is a fabulous upgrade. It works like a dream. Just hang in there and get your library healthy.

Believe me, I was out of my mind unhappy initially. I was so mad. But now, that I have done what I described above to get my library healthy before the upgrade, I am blown away by this program.

Hang in there.

I may have vented in the forum when I posted, I've been reading and using pretty much everything I could find in the forum to solve my issues. The last attempt I made was with a new install and new library of 250 pics imported from a Nikon D3, I could not export 28 clean pics to a folder on my desktop after trying for three hours.

My point is that it is an unnecessary exercise if a viable product was put into the marketplace. I use a program like this as a tool for my photography, much like my camera. If my camera was as unprepared for consumer use as this was, it would be returned within hours.

I buy software to manage things, it is what Aperture is at heart, a database manager. It doesn't work. Look at all the issues in this forum in the last few days. Would you be employed if you were responsible for something like this going to market?

Apple has rarely stumbled in the past few years. This was a pratfall.

My attitude is reflective of what I perceive as an arrogant attempt by Apple to foist an unfinished, rushed product on me

I had posted this in response to my own thread, but I thought I would share my experience with the trial version.
I just spent a few minutes editing and working up a shoot from today. If I make a few global adjustments, I can export the file. If I use several brushes, not only can I not export the file(it just hangs with the "exporting" wheel turning and I have to force quit), but I also can no longer zoom in and look at the image at 100%. I tried repair permissions and rebuild the 80 image library, but no change.
This is quite upsetting what is going on here. The brushes and the upgrades are beautiful to work with, and I am dying to use this program, but it is clear there is some problem that has to be worked out. There is no way I am going to risk my main library as it is around 600gb. If the program can't handle 1.2gb, how can I trust it with 600gb? Sadly, I think I will return the package when it arrives for a refund until an update is issued.
I have a 27"iMac, i7, 2TB, 8GBRam.

An update on my frustrating experience with A3 crashes -- I was finally able to import a medium-sized A2 library into A3. After many failures, here's what worked:

1) make a backup copy of the A2 library, just in case
2) clean and rebuild the A2 library using methods described elsewhere in this post
3) launch A3. Turn off "faces" and turn off "automatically reprocess images" and turn off "automatically build previews" (in preferences)
4) create a clean A3 library
5) IMPORT your A2 library into the empty A3 library (you can do this even with the trial version)
6) wait....wait....wait....Done! It took about 6 hours to import approx 15,000 images spread over 125 projects (about 1 image per second)
7) DO NOT MESS WITH THE IMAGES UNTIL THE IMPORT IS COMPLETED! This was key for me. If you play around with the images while the import is running, A3 will crash. This suggests that there may be programming bugs around synchronized access to shared data structure. A3 runs hundreds of "threads" at the same time, and clearly the import process doesn't work well with editing process.
8) Once imported, you must manually "reprocess masters" if you want to work with the new tools. Do this image by image or project by project.
9) The process used large amounts of VM, but did not appear to be "leaking" -- stabilized at around 1.7 GB VM and 1.5GB real memory.

Once this stripped down import was done, performance is very good, better than A2 on most things.

The new features are very nice. Especially "brushes"


A few more details:
* 95% of my images are "referenced" to files on a local HD
* Mix of 10D, 20D, and 40D, and 7D images, mostly raw
* I don't use "faces" and I don't have any GPS data

Good Luck, and here's hoping some fixes come out soon.