From iPhoto to Aperture: Saving Space

In my previous post I mention that I had switched from iPhoto to Aperture. I've been using iPhoto since the very first version and have always enjoyed it. Over the years, as Apple has improved it that enjoyment has grown. It's never been perfect but worked weåll enough for the number of images I worked with. However, soon after I purchased my DSLR it became very obvious very quickly that I would have to do something about storage of images. Not only were my images 2-3mb each, up from 500kb, but I was also taking far more. In fact, I'm taking 500 images a month rather than 500 a year! I expect that during the winter months I'll take fewer but regardless, my shutter is clicking far more often so saving hard drive space was my first and primary motivation in the switch.

As much as I enjoy iPhoto it does require far more hard drive space when editing photos. While most of my editing is very subtle I do edit almost every photograph. With iPhoto that means a copy is made of the original. Imagine, my monthly total of 500 images, averaging 2.5 mb that's 1.2 gigs a month. With iPhoto that would be nearly doubled!! I hope to begin to pair each months photos down to 300 images or less but that is still around 750mb a month. By comparison, Aperture's method of non-destructive editing results in a small text file of a few kb for each edit version. If I want to use my Aperture images in other applications such as iMovie, Keynote, or Pages I have to make previews of those images, which results in an additional file of 125 - 250 kb. I don't make previews for all of my images, just my highest rated so my previews are still under a total of 100 mb.

The actual process of switching was relatively painless but certainly required a bit of effort. I'll discuss that as well as some of the other differences between iPhoto and Aperture in a future post.

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

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