The Move to Aperture

I recently upgraded from iPhoto to Aperture. Overall, I'm glad I did, though this assessment may be a bit premature. I'm a reasonably experienced iPhoto users, so hopefully my experience could be instructive for others out there.

Here are my initial thoughts on Aperture:

• Import Process: Setting up the process to import is easy and I particularly liked how the process did not take up all available resources. That is to say, after Aperture identified all of the events from iPhoto to import, it went about the import in an event by event fashion. As soon as an event was imported, you could go to work on it.
• Faces Import Data Integrity:Faces information came in well. All of the people that I had tagged were there with all of their associated pictures. Note that this included 100's of photos for some of the kids, so it would have been a real hassle if it had not worked well.
• Places Import Data Integrity:Apparent failure at first. None of the geotagging information seemed to be imported. None whatsoever. That is say that when I went to the map, there were no pins on it. At first, there are only two things that mitigate this failure: ex post geotagging is easily done with multiple photos and you can import a GPS track log and pictures to geotag. This will remove the extra step of using GPSPhotoLinker for doing this with iPhoto. After messing around some more, and unsure if I was just looking at things incorrectly previously, it appears that my tagging information is still there. Excellent. I'm looking forward to tagging a larger percentage of newly imported pictures and will also work to tag some old stuff due to the easier process.
• Image Adjustments: Brushes One of the items that I thought was particularly interesting about Aperature was the ability to brush in our out an image adjustment. This has already come in very handy for some post-processing of an image that needed the lowlights brought up, but had some blacks in it that I wanted preserved. Not a problem, just brush out the adjustment on those areas.
• Keyboard Shortcuts: There are a lot of them, which is very appealing to me. I've already downloaded a cheat sheet and have put next to my monitor. I hope to learn them over time.
• Interface: I will have to say that I have done much more stray clicking around in Aperture than I have ever done in iPhoto. The interface looks like its going to take some getting used to. That said, I'm not worried that it will never make sense. I think it will just take some getting use to.
• More to come . . . .