Aperture 3: First impressions

A few hours ago I saw in my Apple RSS feed that Aperture 3 has been released so I immediately followed the embedded link, browsed the new features and downloaded the demo. I’m no professional photographer. I shoot mostly for fun and once in a while for the websites I design. Aperture 2 is good, but there were some weak points I hated. Here’s what’s new at a glance, and what I love about Aperture 3, for a full list of all new feature visit Aperture’s features website:

• There is face recognition – borrowed from iPhoto now you can tag your friends, family and models :)
• There is geotagging – again, borrowed from iPhoto, you can view on a map where your photos were shot. But there’s an additional feature – you can geotag your existing photos using a track file. Here’s a simple workflow for you – get MotionX GPS Lite for your iPhone, make sure your camera and your iPhone’s clocks are in sync, fire MotionX GPS up, and start shooting. When you import your photo shoot in Aperture you can easily geotag your photos from the MotionX GPS’ exported track file. Of course that will work with any other GPS phone that can export tracks. I can finally get rid of the software that used to GPS tag my photos! You can, of course, tag your photos by hand too – just drag and drop them on the map!
• You can easily switch multiple libraries. Until now when I was done with a project I had to export it as a Project and store it on my external hard drive, if I needed a picture I had to re-import it just to find one picture – no more! You can export your project as a library and later on simply open it from Aperture! Although I haven’t tested this it is a very prominent and missed-by-me-until-now feature.
• I can finally hook up my phone to Aperture! Aperture now does Video! Video editing cannot be compare to Final Cut or any other video editing software but this is a photo management/editing software after all. Finally you can have your handset’s images and videos in one place!
• You can post your photos to Facebook and Flickr. With Aperture 2 you could use a number of plugins and 3rd party software to upload directly to Facebook and Flickr but you no longer need to use any of that – just click the button in the main toolbar!

While using Aperture 3 for an hour or so I came across only one drawback – I couldn’t use my Aperture 2 library with the demo, but I’m pretty sure it will be converted if I were to use the full version.

Aperture 3 really is a major release with many new major features. To be honest I don’t think there’s anything I miss from Aperture 3 unlike Aperture 2.