Aperture 4???

Aperture 3.3 and OS X 10.8.2 have been crash-o-rama for me. I've been getting more crashes from Aperture than every other application on my Mac, times ten. Sometimes the crash requires re-building the database, which takes no small amount of time. It's just sad how the vision behind Aperture has been let down by such shoddy execution. Aperture is missing a number of important features, but the main one at this point is getting through an evening of photo processing without crashing.

—Andreas

I got my new MBP yesterday and 4th photo in crashed. froze the whole computer and forced shutdown... Anyone had experiance with Lightroom thinking about making a switch.

- Michael

I'm not convinced that a version number of 4 would by itself fix crashing or data corruption issues.

I've personally found Aperture 3.3 and later (including 3.4.1) to be extremely stable: I don't recall a single crash. I've been running Mountain Lion with them.

So I suspect there are some issues, either with the system or with your library, which are causing these problems. I wish I had suggestions as to what might be involved, but I don't know. I don't think it's Aperture itself though - it's more likely the system or some extensions or disk format or something.

What William said. Aperture 3 had stability issues until 3.3 (iirc). It has been stable for months. That it isn't indicates that there is something wrong. That it works for thousands of users and not for you indicates that the problem is local. The first trouble-shooting step is to see if it works well in another user account on your machine.

The _only_ crashes I have since roughly 3.3 come from using different secondary monitors. These have stopped since I adopted the practice of:

- closing Aperture before moving the machine to a new location, and

- waking the machine and disconnecting the secondary monitor before moving the machine to a new location.

I run several very different Libraries (different sizes, files, configurations), some of them critical to users. None show any corruption or instability.

I do switch between running my Mac with the interval screen and an external monitor and will see if re-starting Aperture when making that switch helps with the crashing. The crashes don't occur right after I wake the machine from sleep after changing configuration. It's typically that I'll select an image, hit cmd-shift-e to export, get a beachball for a few seconds, and then Aperture disappears from the screen. It happens during other operations, but this the most common. Apple has a roomfull of crash reports with increasingly frustrated/snarky comments from me by now.

As for LR4, the user interface is something you'd think was designed by a group of toddlers. And you still want me to manage my own image files on disk? How quaint! You can do what needs doing, but I kept thinging: "No, really, that's how you have to do it?" À chacun son goût…

—Andreas

Aperture 3.3 and OS X 10.8.2 have been crash-o-rama for me.

So, why haven't you updated to Aperture 3.4.1, the current version?

So, why haven't you updated to Aperture 3.4.1, the current version?

Not sure where the 3.3 came from—I'm running 3.4.1 😊

It came from you:

"As for LR4, the user interface is something you'd think was designed by a group of toddlers."

Be fair. It *does* have a nice flourish at the bottom of the row of icons. That you can customize!

It came from you:

I know that. I'm not sure what drove me to write 3.3 when "Aperture" -> "About Aperture" clearly pops up 3.4.1.

In any case, C1P7 is apparently getting DAM capabilities…

😁 I do miss that.

Aperture 3.4.1 is driving me nuts too, on OSX 10.8.2 on my late 2009 MacBook Pro. It's unstable, every few days it needs to repair the library (which takes ages), and it occassionally eats up *all* of my RAM (8GB) and locks up my computer. No other application I use is even close to as unreliable. And it used to work fine before Mountain Lion.

In response to William and Kirby, I've reformatted my hard drive and resinstalled OSX (after one of the Aperture initiated crashes), I've rebuilt my Aperture library (twice), I've deleted my Aperture preferences, and I've deleted and reinstalled Aperture from the AppStore. Disk First Aid finds no problems with my machine. I'm at a loss as to what to try next (besides Lightroom).

It's great to hear that most users are not being affected by this. I'm still finding it hard to believe that the problem is not Aperture directly. Come on Apple! Show Aperture a little love.

I am in the same boat. 3.4.1 on 10.8.2 is crashing and rebuilding databases almost daily. Not to mention that a few days ago it decided that the Aperture database file was for some reason an iPhoto file. This is getting pretty annoying. 2012 MBA and no external monitors here.

Why have you not upgraded to 3.4.2? That release has some important bug-fixes.

Good point. I do have 3.4.2. Seems like there has been a new update to Aperture every week recently, so I lost track.