Last week, I received an email from a wedding photographer, asking for some Aperture help. She's found that after she works in Aperture for a while, each adjustment she makes takes longer and longer (sometimes on the order of 10 seconds), and she was wondering if I had any thoughts about what was going wrong and how to make things faster. She has a high-end Powermac G5 with a good graphics card, a large library with tens of thousands of images, and all of her images are stored on firewire drives.

The first thing we did was to go into the Finder and make sure we could open some of the images quickly in Preview (/Applications/Preview). There are a few reasons for this. One is that Preview is a great, lightweight debugging tool--it uses standard Mac OS X pieces to read image files, and if Preview had some problem opening a file, e.g. if it couldn't read the file format, then it's likely the file(s) itself is at fault. Secondly, I wanted to make sure that there was nothing funky in the firewire connection or the drive. Since Preview opened those files quickly without a problem, we needed to dig further.

In Aperture, we talked for a bit about her workflow. Her editing process consists of multiple passes, going from basic ratings/small adjustments to more involved adjustments, and finally to cropping. She uses lift and stamp extensively to quickly distribute tweaks, too. My main suggestions here were to try to limit the amount of information Aperture has to process as early as possible. For example, get rid of bad images so that Aperture won't need to load them. Similarly, try cropping sooner so that there are fewer pixels in some images to apply adjustments to. Furthermore, I mentioned that she should turn off previews, because I've noticed that when I adjust an image, Aperture automatically updates the preview, which sometimes slows things down.

I also suggested that every once in a while, especially if her adjustments are becoming slow, she quit/re-open Aperture to flush out any junk hanging around in her system's memory and that every once in a while, she log out (Apple menu > Log Out) to flush even more accumulated junk out.

The next thing we looked at is how her files are stored within Aperture. She primarily has one wedding to a project, with on the order of 1,000 images in each project (after editing). What we looked at here was because Aperture appears to load files in the background so that they're ready when we want them, how could we limit the number of files Aperture is considering? Clearly the answer is to use albums to group subsets of images.

Finally, my last suggestion was to try rebuilding her library by holding down command+option while starting Aperture so that in case there was some weird data inconsistency, Aperture could repair it.

It turns out that the absolute biggest speedup was when she put a subset of her images into an album and did her adjustments within the album. At first, this was surprising, yet it makes a lot of sense when you think about it--you're limiting the number of active images. With a little bit of thought, Aperture is now running at top speed for that photographer!

Lastly, on a completely different note, I've had to flirt with the dark side lately. You see, I've been shooting with a Canon 1Ds Mark III (which is hands-down the nicest camera I've ever used), and Aperture doesn't support it yet. I've been using the Lightroom demo (as well as Bridge) to edit my images (I want to tweak RAW files and not just adjust large JPEGs). While I think some of the Develop functions in Lightroom are quite nice, and I definitely think that it is a fine option for Windows users, I am not a fan of the overall program. Plus, despite what some people claim, it's really not faster than Aperture (I've seen the text "Rendering Large Preview" a lot lately!) in my experience. I think I have become spoiled by Aperture's full-screen option, modeless interface, and HUDs, and I'm looking forward to the update that lets me edit these files in Aperture!