Following on from an earlier thread, this is just a quick straw poll to see which one people prefer and why. Personally, I use Aperture, but not because I think it's better, it was just more cost-effective than Lightroom.

I use Lr.
Using Aperture would have forced me to upgrade my graphics card, adding at least another £200 to the cost of the application at the time.
Lr worked (still does) on my existing set up, so Adobe got my money.

Mark

I went Aperture because at the time it offered the best option (and wasn't made by Adobe, who royally p!ssed me off by killing Freehand to get their grubby mitts on Dreamweaver and Flash). Aperture has a plugin architecture which has spawned lots of interesting and sometimes pricey doodads to do fun things with your images.

Since then, Adobe have upped the ante with LR2 - I like the look of the gradient filter tools, among others.

Of course, the Aperture option isn't open to non-Mac users nor, like Mark said, to those whose kit didn't meet the minimum spec. For these reasons, I fully expect Lightroom to be the more popular choice overall.

Heather, your mention of Freehand makes me think that Aperture and Lightroom offer something we haven't seen in a long time - two heavyweights slugging it out to win our custom. It's nice to have the option of two nice applications to choose from.

I think I mentioned on another thread that I use Lightroom. I have tried both, but Aperture didn't have the feature set or the ease of use that Lightroom does, and, like Mark, the original Mac I had wasn't up to scratch for the Intel-requiring Aperture.

This is probably potential new thread material, but what features did you find lacking, Nick?

(I'm interested, as an Aperture user - I nearly typed "sufferer" then! I may go into that another time - because I'm still finding features I've not explored fully yet. I find I sort of grow into Aperture's workflow, and when I need something I discover it's been there all along, if that makes sense.)

I was a beta tester for LR, and knowing I was starting as a PC user but would likely buy a Mac pretty much made up my mind for me. That and a hefty discount! (8-p)

I'd imagine LR will win, not least because it's cross platform. A poll for LR (PC), LR (Mac) and Apperture could yield some interesting results, I think...

LR2 does now include a plug-in architecture, but I'm not sure it's as used yet as Apperture (not that I'm fully aware of what either offers - I mostly use export-plugins for LR2)

Edd

Neither.
Yet to see the point, tbh.

Hmm... wonder why... :D

I thought that until I had over 4000 images I had to wade through to find the one I wanted. I knew roughly which month they were taken, but then had to shuffle through the folders to find the actual download. Add into the mix adjusted images that had been exported to Photoshop, or JPEG for sending on to people. It all got a right royal mess.

LR and Aperture - think iPhoto++. The software does the hard bit of keeping tabs on everything, while I just load more and more piccies into it.

I came across a film photographer who used LR to manage their images once they'd been scanned, so it's not just the digital snappers who rave about this stuff.

I've never got on with iPhoto either.
I'm sure it's all very good but I did sit down with the demo of LR and was just a bit 'meh' about it all.

Maybe I'll have another go - I just can't see the need for it in my life at the moment.

Until I started using digital RAW files I used Lightroom for scanned TIFFs. It was pretty slow, tbh (though it was a pre-release beta) and without the automatic importing of EXIF data it was quite a chore, so I can sympathise with Alex on this. However with the huge increase in volume of images, I couldn't live without it now.

Aperture at the moment. Regulars here will not em interest in Lightroom because it supports one of my camera’s RAW files, and Apple doesn’t. So I am considering my options ATM.

I've been thinking of upgrading my RAM and HDD in my MBP to 4GB and 500GB respectively.

Once I have done that I may think about Aperture again. At the moment though I have 30+GB of photos on my MBP and about 15GB of free space so moving to Aperture (where it takes a copy of my library) isn't really an option for me at the moment.

I ended up moving my Aperture library to a 320GB external drive.

It's scary how quickly hard drives fill up, and that's only with 10MP images!