Filed under: Software
32 ways to speed up Aperture
Aperture, Apple's professional photo workflow application, is one of my favourite applications. Period. However, with its RAW processing and non-destructive editing, it's something of a resource-intensive application -- even on high powered systems.Thankfully, Aperture supremo Steve Weller (a.k.a. Bagelturf) has published 32 mighty-handy tips on how you can speed up the application. Some are perhaps more obvious -- for example finding a better graphics card for Aperture's GPU-based editing -- but there's also a selection of great little tweaks you can make to Aperture to get it running a little snappier. See Steve's site for the full rundown.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
David said 5:34PM on 12-03-2007
Switching to Adobe's Lightroom would give you a huge speed bump. I personally really don't see why anyone would be using Aperture over Lightroom at this point after using the two.
but those tips are great for the people that do use it, even if most of them are common sense things.
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Nik Fletcher said 5:38PM on 12-03-2007
David,
Lightroom may well be faster (I've not really used it since the early days of the public beta and it's probably time I revisited it) but I found the modular layout just a little too annoying and didn't allow me to quickly go from browsing to editing to whatever quick enough.
I also found the UI to be somewhat offputting, but that's purely a matter of taste, not speed!
Thanks,
Nik
beerguy said 5:48PM on 12-03-2007
Disks are filled from the outside inwards because this gives the highest data rates for the first data written to the disk. As disks are filled to capacity, the data rate slows, so fill disks only to 50% to 75% capacity for best performance.
This is complete rubbish. While modern disk drives still present cylinders, heads and sectors to the OS it's an abstraction. You have zero control over where the data actually lives on the platter. The author is making that assumption based on technology that died 15 years ago.
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kkonstan said 6:24PM on 12-03-2007
Go check any throughput measurement for any drive at a site like storagereview.com and you will find that it still holds true today as it did 15 years ago. HDs use multiple zones and each zone has more sectors per revolution going from inside to the outside. Also, the blocks are addressed from 0 to whatever starting from the inside, so yes, you do know where a block is relative to the others, unless it was bad and rellocated, in which case chances are it's still in the same cylinder group anyway.
Konstantinos Konstantinidis said 6:29PM on 12-03-2007
Go check any throughput measurement for any drive at a site like storagereview.com and you will find that it still holds true today as it did 15 years ago.
Todays HDs still use multiple zones and outer zones have more sectors per revolution than inner ones for obvious reasons, thus hold more data and transfer them faster per platter revolution.
True, true geometry is no longer exposed, but the logical block addressing that is used instead is a sequential number from 0 to whatever number of blocks the disk has, and these indeed are numbered from outside inwards, for performance reasons.
Here's a graph:
http://www.storagereview.com/images/ST31000340NS_str_inner.png
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Alex said 8:05PM on 12-03-2007
David said...
Switching to Adobe's Lightroom would give you a huge speed bump. I personally really don't see why anyone would be using Aperture over Lightroom at this point after using the two.
but those tips are great for the people that do use it, even if most of them are common sense things.
Perhaps you should try both. I used both on my library. Guess what, neither had a speed advantage. I was expecting to be blown away by Adobe's speed advantage. And after a solid month of hard use I can tell you IT DOESN"T EXSIST!!!
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Tim said 7:22AM on 12-04-2007
I found the biggest selling point for Lightroom was the integration with Photoshop. However, I don't use photoshop as I have trouble justifying the price for it. It may be worth spending that much for software for people who will use it to it's fullest potential, but for a casual user it's serious overkill.
Aperture (with student discount) was a reasonable price for me, and integrates well with apple's other software. It does what I need it to do and for a price that I was comfortable paying.
I find too many people these days are wrapped up in wanting the best of the best of the best according to everyone else's standards. If anyone anywhere expresses displeasure with a product, that product is suddenly not good enough for them.
If it does what you need it to do and at a price you are comfortable with paying, then be happy. There is no 'holy grail' product that will do everything perfectly. You just need to find something that works for you.
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Joe said 7:43AM on 12-04-2007
Wow, if you have to do all that to improve your performance, something is seriously wrong. I run Aperture on a year-old Macbook on a 24" 1900x1200 Dell monitor.
I only notice appreciably slowdown when working with large RAW files. RAWs of smaller file-size seem to be just a quick as JPEGs.
I would imagine that any Mac with a dedicated graphics card would run much better. I think I'd be inclined to look at the overall health of my Mac if it was high-spec.ed and still slow.
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