When Apple released its Aperture software, the presentation on the web site and the touted capabilities rose high expectations. During the past few days, those expectations have been subdued by bugs, performance issues and more nasty behaviour of Apple’s newest “Pro application”. Aperture turns out to be what I called it earlier on this site: a Digital Asset Management software with a high price tag. There is other DAM software available for Macs: Portfolio and iView are excellent examples of DAM programs which are suited to individual use.
In this comparative review, I’m comparing the three DAM solutions for the individual available for Mac OS X. Portfolio 8 has just been released, with iView Media Pro 3 hitting the streets a few weeks earlier. Let’s start with Portfolio.
Portfolio 8
Portfolio 8 is Extensis’ latest iteration of the venerable DAM solution that existed as a Mac OS 9 and earlier product. In the course of the years, Portfolio has been added features to and gained a server and web publishing component. Portfolio is a medium-heavy DAM solution, meaning it will scale considerably, but not up to the point that it will store files in a database, as the heavy-weight DAM solutions do.
Instead, Portfolio 8 relies on the computer’s file system. Portfolio 8 has been upgraded to include a whole slew of new features, but nothing in the area of database support. In short, Portfolio 8 is not a break with the past; it’s an incremental upgrade with lots of new features that will appeal to small workgroups for the regular version and larger workgroups for the server version.
New features of Portfolio 8 include the ability to custom sort within galleries, scratchpad galleries, public and private galleries, fast cataloguing, custom XMP and CS information panels, improvements with folders synchronisation, file format support and use of preview images.
Using Portfolio is straightforward: you can just drag and drop folders and files in the catalogue window, and the program will index the files and generate thumbnails if possible. The cataloguing performance has indeed been improved, but I found RAW camera file format support not to be as complete as I would have liked it to be.
Some new digital cameras’ RAW format is supported, some others is not. The Kodak P880, for example, is not on the list. Adobe DNG RAW files are supported, however, which is good news to photographers. RAW format support might perhaps not be as important to Portfolio as it should be for Aperture, for example. Portfolio is a DAM solution, which means it will also catalogue non-photographic or non-image files. QuarkXpress documents, for example, for which Portfolio 8 does deliver support on the Mac, and video files like .DV and .3GPP2.
Dropping files on Portfolio is one way of adding files to a catalogue, but I don’t think it’s the best way to go about. Although it’s one of Extensis’ marketing points, in working with Portfolio 8, my experience is that it is far better to have a file-system based organisation of your files that you’re happy with, before you start cataloguing them.
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Portfolio 8 is capable of automatically finding a file that has been moved in the Finder, and updates its catalogue accordingly. This feature makes Portfolio a must-have DAM program, because it means the program adjusts to whatever workflow your need of the moment dictates. However, for die-hards, even in version 8 you can manage your files in Portfolio and don’t have them updated in the Finder.
Portfolio does have ‘watch folders’ too, they will track files being added to them—a sort of intermediate solution between the old way and the totally synchronized method. Personally, I can’t see why anyone should bother using the old way or the in-between method. What can be easier than having folders and catalogues synchronize with each other? Especially as Portfolio 8 gives you the choice of updating the synchronization manually or automatically.
In version 8, watch folders have become somewhat more powerful. You can set the frequency at which the folders are scanned and select corresponding cataloguing behaviour when folders change, resulting in something that closely resembles the automatic Find feature I discussed earlier.
ScratchPad galleries are temporary baskets to hold files from different other galleries or searches. A ScratchPad gallery allows you to collect files from different virtual (that is: existing only inside Portfolio) locations and then saving the ScratchPad as a new gallery, printing it, or publishing it to a web page.
Queries—which can be run as QuickFind or complicated Find queries—can be saved to a ScratchPad gallery directly, or you can drag the results from the Find results gallery to the ScratchPad for later use.
In my experience, ScratchPad galleries are a nice to have feature, but they’re not must-haves. Private galleries, on the other hand, are certainly valuable. Private galleries are secure galleries in that they require you to enter a password before you can actually see their contents. This actually allows for granular control over who is to see and use specific images, which is an often quoted request from workgroup users.
Portfolio 8 also shines when it comes to the Help functionality. At first, this didn’t work on my system, as I have Flash’s security level set to the highest. After adjusting this so it will allow Flash content to be freely run when the applet resides on one of my local disks, the Help functionality proved to be of a quality, both in terms of design and contents, that I have rarely seen before.
With Portfolio 8’s Help, you don’t need a manual at all.
There are yet other novelties but they’re not so terribly important in my opinion, except perhaps for the ratings and labelling system. Also, Smart Galleries, which work like Smart Anything in Mac OS X 10.4.x, make it yet easier to create your own optimum workflow.
iView Media Pro 3
iView Media Pro 3 takes a slightly different approach to DAM. It is clearly aimed at individual users and not so much at workgroups, although it probably will scale to workgroups of about 5 people.
iView only knows catalogues, not galleries. If you want to change your view of an existing catalogue’s worth of assets, you simply change that view by using catalogue sets. These sets are the equivalent of Portoflio’s galleries. They are just as flexible, and allow you to combine existing catalogues or parts of catalogues together.
iView Media Pro 3, just as Portfolio, cannot automatically find a file, but it too knows about watched folders which enable you to achieve pretty much the same functionality. In iView Media Pro 3, you can tell the program to turn on folder watch for any catalogue you wish. This is a somewhat different approach than the one taken by Portfolio.
The watched folders feature will show you, with small icons, what is happening inside each folder—are files being added, removed…?—and will then give you the opportunity to update the catalogue or update it automatically, or ignore it altogether.
Where iView Media Pro 3 really shines is in its import capabilities. The program will not only import from disk, camera, or iPhoto, but also from Spotlight Queries. You set up the query in iView Media Pro itself, and the resulting list can be appended to the existing, open catalogue, or to a new one. In my opinion, this deserves good marks, as it makes good use of what Mac OS X 10.4.x has to offer in terms of file management power.
iView Media Pro 3 shines in more than one integration area: it also integrates well with Adobe’s Bridge, and that is to me worth another bunch of good marks. Ratings and labels set in the Bridge will automatically be taken in by iView Media Pro, and vice versa, although iView applies a trick with labels which get written to the file as IPTC “urgency” labels.
Catalogues being the only containers in iView Media Pro 3, the application must provide some solid catalogue management features, and it does. You can browse through catalogues on disk by using a cleverly designed “catalogue Find” window, which allows you to search each mounted volume for iView catalogues.
Another well thought out feature is the catalogue combination feature, which enables users to concatenate catalogues and combine them into one, bigger catalogue. On the downside, the protection and security features are weak. Indeed, iView warns against depending upon their built-in password-protection scheme.
If you want to make sure catalogues are really private, you should store them in a secure location. The manual suggests a PGP-disk.
Metadata and annotation implementation is robust. Metadata can be synchronised between Media Pro and XMP applications, and everything you add to metadata fields in iView Media Pro 3, is automatically available to all XMP-applications.
iView Media Pro 3 also shines in the area of image manipulation. There has been given much thought, for example, to the quality of images. As a result, JPEG rotation is lossless, meaning the rotated version does not receive any subsequent compression to prevent JPEG artefacts from showing up.
The image editor that is built-in to iView Media Pro 3 offers crop, resize, transform, rotate, sharpen edges, remove grain and red eye, convert to duotone, adjust saturation, brightness and contrast, colour balance and colour levels, and invert negative capabilities. There are also two automatic settings.
Finally, iView Media Pro 3 includes a virtual Lightbox which shows up to four images on a black background. The Lightbox has a magnifying glass and some extra features that are also available in the regular interface. However, I found the Lightbox to be the least interesting of the program, because it doesn’t really integrate well with the rest of iView Media Pro 3.
The Lightbox looks like an add-on to set the application apart from its competitors—which it really doesn’t need as it is a powerful DAM solution by itself already. The Lightbox also is a bit of a statement that iView Media Pro 3 is, in contrast to Portfolio 8, more of a serious photographers’ tool than it wants to be the most complete DAM solution.
Aperture
Apple’s Aperture is the latest addition to the crop of image management solutions. However, in contrast to Portfolio 8 and iView Media Pro 3, Aperture is not a real DAM solution. It will only manage photographs; more specifically, photos saved in RAW, JPEG and TIFF format. Don’t expect Aperture to understand JPEG 2000 or EPS to name but these two.
When Aperture was announced, speculation had it that it would be a replacement to Adobe Photoshop. In reality, Aperture is as much a Photoshop replacement as Portfolio or iView Media Pro is—i.e. not at all. There is a misconception that Aperture will allow you to replace Photoshop for anything except some very specific tasks such as RAW conversion and some aspects of photo retouching.
That is true, but Aperture’s real strength lies in its management features, not in its image processing capabilities—regardless of Apple’s hype machine and regardless of what others have been saying as a reaction to the hype.
Where Aperture shines is the way in which it will handle your photos. It integrates with Photoshop, but will never let you edit the original photograph. Aperture will instead generate a version for each and every edit you make outside of the program, and most of the time inside the program as well. Edited versions are identified by small icons shown on image versions.
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The downside to the approach taken with Aperture is that you must follow Apple’s ideas with regards to what constitutes an efficient workflow, and that a disk will contain copied image files every time you open an image in Photoshop to edit it. Mind you, Aperture is clever enough just to save one extra file for all Photoshop edits.
Where will you find those files? This question has been the subject of some heated debate on Apple’s own Aperture forums. Some photographers were even worried that Aperture’s library wasn’t a safe place to put their photos into. Well, the Aperture library is nothing more than one of those famous Mac OS X bundles, which contents you can see by control-clicking the library and selecting “Show package contents”. When you do that, you will find a lot of nested folders with, in one of them, the actual packages containing your images.
If, for some reason, you should want to copy the actual images from the Aperture library, the “Show package contents” context menu is the way to go. My advice, however, is to stay away from tampering with these packages entirely, unless you know very well what you’re doing. Aperture depends on the library for it to work, on a SQLite database to track and trace all the things it does (versioning) and on XML as the glue to stick it all together.
If you’re worried about your photos, it is best to move them to a Vault. This is another rather innovative way in which Aperture sets itself apart from the DAM solutions we’ve discussed so far. Backing up is an integrated functionality with Aperture. It is not with Portfolio nor with iView Media Pro.
Vaults are meant to provide for safe backup locations. Vaults can be USB-, FireWire, or SATA connected disk drives. Unfortunately, Aperture does not allow you to set up a Vault on a network drive, or even on a server’s drive. This means that—at least with version 1.0—you can’t use a XSAN or a NAS solution that you might already be using.
Instead, Vaults have to be directly attached storage (DASD) devices. That’s not such a good show, but if you decide to use an external FireWire or SATA disk(s) setup, you have the option to store the complete Vault as offline storage that is directly available when you need it. Just carry the disk(s) (perhaps put in Mirrored RAID) from the offline location to the online location, plug it in, and you’re ready to go.
This might be the idea behind Apple not supporting network storage, but even then it’s weak not to support your own XSAN product—which has been winning much praise from even enterprise-level research analysts like Gartner and Forrester!
Another reason for not supporting networked storage might be the speed at which Aperture copies your library to the Vault in this first version of the program. The crucial term here is “Speed”. I should have said: lack of speed. A library with hardly 100 photos in it, takes well over five minutes to transfer to the vault on a Power Mac G5 dual 1.8 GHz with 2.5 GB of RAM. Admittedly, the machine is not the very latest and best, but to most photographers this system will suffice.
Nevertheless, the fact that Aperture includes a backup system earns praise by itself. It should be faster and it should have some form of scheduling functionality so that you can set it to run automatically at regular intervals, but this might well be in the pipeline for the next version.
The Vault itself is a locked package file with everything to get you moving with Aperture as if you’d never left the program—including the preference settings.
Aperture’s RAW conversion has been another subject of heated debate. Again, much of that debate has been biased towards Adobe’s ACR product. Aperture allegedly performed very bad, with some people reporting unusable results while others had no problems at all. The truth lies somewhere in the middle. Aperture’s RAW conversion has its problems, but so has Adobe’s. It turns out that ACR is superior for many RAW formats, and Aperture for a smaller number of other RAW formats, with both programs performing bad at random RAW formats.
The focus has been shifted towards TIFF output now. Which brings us to the printing system in Aperture. The bad news is that the Print dialogue window is slow as molasses. Printing a photograph in Photoshop is about ten times as fast as with Aperture. The good news is that Aperture’s interface is easier to understand, and better to avoid making mistakes.
The really bad news is that you’re always forced to use some form of colour management originating in the system. There is—as far as I can see—no option to have the printer decide on colour management, an option which creates the best results with for example the HP Photosmart 8750 inkjet photo printer.
Back to the TIFF output: that one is fine. At least, I couldn’t discover major problems with it.
Aperture’s photo retouching features are on the skinny side. No matter what Apple’s web site may tell you, there’s a lot lacking in that area. Among the most useful are the rotating buttons and the straighten tool. The Levels dialogue is nicely designed, but is not comparable to Photoshop’s Levels tool, and certainly not to Photoshop’s Curve tool.
All other retouching features are nice, but personally, I think you’re better off retouching with Photoshop—just as what I would recommend with Portfolio and iView Media Pro for that matter.
The Histogram for example, is nicely done, and it will show you exactly the same as the one in Photoshop. But that’s just the problem: you can look at Aperture’s histogram to see if there is a problem with the image, but if you want to correct that problem, it is just as easy to edit the photo in Photoshop. Some people have reported inaccuracies with the histogram’s representation. I read one user’s comments that he messed with a photo in Photoshop until the histogram showed gaps.
He was upset he couldn’t see those gaps in Aperture. The histogram this particular user was looking at—the one showing the gaps—was the Levels’ tool histogram. I tried replicating Aperture’s behaviour as reported by this user, and I couldn’t for the simple fact that it will not even show up in Photoshop itself.
You can try it yourself: in the Levels dialogue, the histogram will show you severe gaps if you mess up an image enough in the Levels dialogue window itself. Now, once you have clicked the OK button, have a look at Photoshop’s histogram—not the one in the Levels dialogue, but the one that sits in the top palette, nicely tucked away in its own tab (by default, in the same palette as where the Navigator lives).
You will not see any gaps anymore. That is because the histogram does not show the awful things that you’re doing to your photograph, but the overall colour and light value distribution of the photo as it is at that particular moment.
It is true Aperture will not show you gaps when you’re really abusing a photo. It will show you a static histogram in its Levels dialogue with buttons that show you what you’re doing. The “live” histogram at the top will change when you change the buttons’ positions, but it will never show any gaps—it will show you in real-time how the photo’s brightness value distribution is organised. This is a different approach of what Photoshop delivers in the Levels tool—and as Photoshop has a headstart of at least six versions, it might be superior.
In short, we would be best advised not to regard Aperture as a Photoshop replacement but for the most basic operations—at least not version 1 of this product. If you like Apple’s interfaces, however, there’s little else that is as nicely done as Aperture’s interface, including the small type on-screen.
Remember, Apple is selling this program to people who have the hardware to run it: a G5 dual 2GHz is required to fit the comfort zone. I would like to make that a G5 Quad and a 30 inch Cinema Display for viewing comfort with lots of RAM and two huge internal hard disks.
Conclusion
Portfolio 8 is an incremental upgrade of an already very powerful, feature-rich program. It is a true DAM solution, very scalable, and with enough nice features to make it a valuable package for users who need to manage all types of digital files, including layout documents, images, drawings, videos, audio files, etc.
iView Media Pro 3 is more than an incremental upgrade. It is a huge step-up of what was already a very complete and user-friendly DAM solution with a focus on photography. iView Media Pro 3 is the best solution for photographers who need to manage other files in the digital publishing area as well. The program is not meant to serve workgroups larger than five people, or so I would imagine.
Aperture is not a DAM solution but a photograph management application. If you would like to call it an iPhoto for professionals, be my guest. I would prefer to call it a very complete and nicely implemented photo management tool, with some retouching / editing functionality.
Aperture wins on interface design and on versioning support. For a first version, the product is full of innovative ideas, concepts and features. Some of these suffer from sloppy implementation, but overall I’m inclined to find Aperture a very promising application which will become a must-have by the time the second version is released.
Which of these three applications should you buy? It all depends on your needs. If you are a professional photographer managing nothing else but photographs, I would go for iView Media Pro 3 for its straightforward management functionality and its lovely features. If you can spare the money, however, I would also buy Aperture and start using it in “shadow mode”, so that when the first updates are released, you feel comfortable using the program and can gradually migrate from iView Media Pro 3.
If, on the other hand, you need more than just photo management alone, stick to iView Media Pro. Unless you’re part of a large workgroup, in which case Portfolio 8 is the only viable solution of the three (and I might add, a far better one than Cumulus). Also, if support for as many file types as possible is of importance, Portfolio will take you the furthest.
Of the three programs discussed, RAW support lags behind what Adobe is offering with ACR. Aperture will probably be brought up to the latest standard with the release of Mac OS X 10.4.4 as this update will include more RAW formats than the ones supported now.
