Aperture, iWeb 08 and iPhoto 08

Before I continue with the theme of my switch from iPhoto to Aperture I thought I'd comment on the recently released iLife apps as they relate to image management and sharing. I've not used iPhoto yet but I'm sure I will before too long. I certainly won't be switching back but I do like to stay current in my skill set should the need arise that a client need training or help with troubleshooting. The iPhoto upgrade looks like a solid and useful upgrade but nothing earth shattering. Of particular note is that iPhoto continues to make back-up copies of each image the user edits which was my primary reason for switching to Aperture.

In regards to sharing images via the web, I'm happy to report that Aperture, with the recent update to 1.5.4 works just fine with the updated iWeb 08. I'm an avid user of Flickr and have been from the early days but I do not pay for the Pro account which means that only my most recent 200 images are accessible. I'm okay with that because I can still tag my photos and add them to group pools which is the point of Flickr, to share and comment on photos. Flickr is as much about social interaction as it is about images. Back in February I decided that for the purposes of sharing older photos, I would set up my own image archive here at MacProductive. My intention was to use iPhoto and iWeb. The main drawback was the size of the image output of iWeb: the files were gigantic, often twice the size of a properly optimized image. My work around involved the time consuming process of optimizing with Photoshop. Not the end of the world but the point of iWeb is to make the process quick and easy.

When I switched to Aperture I tried using the built in gallery creation of Aperture and was disappointed with the layout of the galleries as well as the web optimization. I'm not sure why this seems to be a problem for Apple. Rather than continue with iWeb for my photo pages I went in search of a third party solution. I settled on Myriad's Galerie photo gallery software and have been pretty happy with it. The images are optimized as they should be and updating changed galleries on my server is much easier than iWeb. I can also customize the gallery design as much as I would like and Myriad hosts a free commenting system too.

With the new release of iWeb 08 I was curious to see if Apple had addressed any of the items on my iWeb wishlist. They did improve image optimization in some instances and the new photo album features are mostly an improvement. The ability to preview the images in the albums by hovering over each one is fantastic though I think the slideshow is a bit heavy on the reflections. The final verdict is that my updated image galleries are larger because of new files and effects. I might be able to deal with that but Apple continues to make updating to non .Mac servers a pain. Still no way to upload directly to a server and publishing to a folder marks all files as updated so a selective upload of only changed files based on date is not possible. For now I think I'll stick with Myriad's Galerie. Would have been great to just be able to rely on Aperture and iWeb... oh well, maybe next time?

You can check out my growing archive of images at Dennyville or via my Flickr stream.

Technorati Tags: Apple, OS X, Macintosh, iPhoto 08, iLife, iWeb 08, Aperture