I really need to stop being lazy and start cataloguing my images. A colleague at work recently bought LR and keeps telling me how great it is for cataloguing and quick edits.

So what to do?

Aperture is around £55 and LR is £65ish on Amazon. I have iPhoto on my Mac and of course there are free alternatives out there too.

At the moment I don't use iPhoto and edit in PhotoShop and a variety of smaller paid for apps like Snapseed.

Been an Aperture user for ages, started with it when it was much more expensive but the educational discount brought it down to it's current price level for everyone. It seems to do what I need it to do. I can't say I've used lightroom very much, only used the demo before I ended up buying Aperture, which was a couple of years ago.

TBH though, Aperture hasn't had much of any improvement since V3 came out about a year ago and I'm not entirely sure what Apple's commitment to it is. Might be something to consider in the long term.

I think you can get free time-limited trials of both. Give each a whirl and see which suits you best? They're both work-flow oriented apps, so it's a case of finding which system works best for how you want to work.

This.

I'm Aperture. I'm anti-Adobe for various reasons, but they both do much the same as each other. I prefer the OS level integration with Aperture - being able to see my library from within almost any application is handy.

I've got Lightroom and am quite happy with it although I suspect I could be doing a lot more with it if I could be bothered to put the time in.

As others have said have a go at the free trials and see which one you prefer.

Be aware that Lr has much less stringent hardware requirements than Aperture does.
I guess this is only relevant if you have older Mac hardware.
Lr also runs under Windows, if that helps any.

Mark

EDIT - Also try what Edd said, 'cause that was good advice.

I have both. I use Aperture on my iMac and Lightroom on my Windows laptop. Both offer very similar facilities, but I find Lightroom better fits how I work.

As the others have said, the best option is to get the free trials and try them both.

Ahh, didn't know you could get a trial of Aperture.

The pricing might have made my mind up for me as the price for LR on Amazon has gone up since I last checked making it £35 more than Aperture.

I'm a big fan of Lightroom - in fairness, I've never tried Aperture.
For the sorts of shoots I do regularly, I never need to go into Photoshop.
LR is developing very nicely - just today I was editing some photos for work, and going from RAW into PS was fine, but there were tools from LR I was really missing.
It's a very groovy piece of software.

Using Aperture. It’s a bit of a memory hog, I think. Certainly it runs less smoothly on my Mac Mini (late 2012 model) than it did on my (now deceased) 2008 MacPro. That could be down to the smaller amount of RAM on the Mini, I would certainly expect it to handle Aperture better with more RAM on board.

It seems to do the job I need it to fine - library of images, processing RAW files. The pain is that if I wanted to jump ship to LightRoom is that there is no way to preserve edits while migrating from one to the other. All those adjustments, tags, geo coordinates, etc. for thousands of images would have to be migrated with absolute fidelity. Right now, I’m expecting that once you’ve made your choice, you are pretty much locked in for the duration.

One more ting about Aperture - specifically its Flickr integration. This may also apply to Lightoom. However, my experience today has been around an image, external editors and stacks. A stack is a way to group images in a project. For example, if you have bracketed shots, you would use a stack to keep all those shots together, and elect one to be the key image. Lightroom may do similar - I can't comment on that.

So. If you have a stack and you sync that with Flickr, then the image you have chosen as the Key Image is the one that is synced. This is the workflow I tried today, and got a bit unstuck.

1 - I have a number of images that are single shots. Yesterday, I bought a plugin that corrects lens distortions. In order to do this, the plugin creates a TIFF of the image to work on (much like using an external editor).

2 - So, with the image in the plug-in and nicely corrected, I OK the window to return to Aperture

3 - I now have two images - the original based on the RAW file, and the newly corrected one. So I stack the two, and promote the TIFF to the key image.

4 - I sync with Flickr.

Now at this stage, I assume that the edit will be seen as just that and the image will be replaced. Not so. The new TIFF is uploaded as a new image.

This seems to be how it works. I also have learned that instead of uploading the image as a replacement, Aperture could delete the original (and thus all the comments, views, etc.) and upload a new version.

From what I gather, Lightroom operates in a similar fashion. This has made me consider unpairing Aperture from Flickr and handling my uploads using Uploadr. At the moment, I have a fairly large project underway, and I am going through them with a fine toothed comb making minor corrections and adjustments which I want to be reflected on Flickr. Seems that what I want to happen isn't necessarily what is likely to happen. This and the creation of stacks for some non bracketed shots means that I am not as happy with what Aperture is doing at the moment.

Also, I understand that if I just switch Aperture off, I may lose all Flickr content that it manages, and as far as Flickr is concerned, there is on undo.

So just remember that this feature sounds good, but it has peculiarities and there is no sign of a fix or correction on the horizon.