I’ve been using Aperture for a number of years now – it was relatively easy to get into it as it’s vaguely similar to iPhoto in a lot of ways. I’ve been hearing lots of good things about Lightroom though and with the recent release of the Lightroom 3 public beta, I’ve decided to give it a go.
One thing that has held me back from even looking at lightroom is being able to import my Aperture library, complete with adjustments and other metadata. As Aperture features completely non-destructive edits, all changes you make to images are saved as metadata that’s applied to the original RAW image. There is a fair amount of information out there on how to migrate from Aperture to Lightroom and I think it’s time I had a serious look into it.
From what I can see, I can get the RAW images over no problem. With a little manual work, I can probably get my folder structure. With some XML exporting, I may be able to get keywords. Adjustments look like they’re right off the table though – and it’s understandable, with the adjustments either they come over 100% or not at all as far as I’m concerned – I don’t want just some adjustments coming through and having to go back and redo the adjustments anyway, might as well start all over again if that’s the case.
Straight up, I quite like the interface for Lightroom. There’s still a lot of information there, and a lot of thumbnails, but it does seem like a cleaner layout and it looks less cluttered. I like the workflow steps in the top right-hand corner taking you from your Library to Develop to Slideshow to Print to Web. One thing that I really do want is facial recognition. For complete pro photographers, this probably isn’t high on the feature list, but for keen amateur photographers, taking plenty of snaps of family and friends, having used it in iPhoto 09, it’s a great feature. I’ve been spending a fair amount of time tagging photos with at least the names of family members and the facial recognition does save time when doing it in iPhoto.
Anyway, let’s see how it goes…