I need some photo archiving advice:

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I currently have two iPhoto Libraries, one on my laptop with 4,000 photos and one on my external HD with 13,300 photos. I’m tired of switching back and forth and not knowing which of my photos are in which library. I keep thinking Apple will add multiple volume support to iPhoto, but I guess they never will.

I think I have three options: Google Picasa (free), Apple Aperture ($199), or Adobe Lightroom ($299).

Picasa is nice because it is free. I’ve fiddled with it a little bit and it should be able to handle multiple volumes. Does anyone know if it has performance issues with large volumes? (I’ve only loaded a few pictures at a time.) It seems to have most of the image editing capabilities that I use often, however, I would like to have more. I can open the photos in an external editor, but it would be nice to simplify my workflow.

From the product pages it looks like both Aperture and Lightroom let you use multiple volumes. Beyond that I don’t know the strengths and weaknesses of each. How difficult is it to migrate from iPhoto? What about from Picasa? Does Lightroom have the performance issues that other Adobe products have on the Mac? Is Lightroom $100 better than Aperture?

They both offer free trials, but I’d like to get some feedback before jumping in on one or the other.

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2 thoughts on “I need some photo archiving advice:”

  1. Hey Dwight…

    I'm a pretty die-hard LR user… been with it since v1 was in Beta. But, as good of a program as it is, It has limitations & I've noticed that my catalogue (now at 100k images on two 1TB harddrives) is a little slow.

    I like the RAW processing capabilities, however the noise reduction leaves a little to be desired compared to Aperture. I like the PS integration. I like the web & print functions.

    I own both LR & Aperture, but only use Aperture for tethered capture on location. I don't know what it is exactly, but it seems like everything in LR is where I think it should be & called what I think it should be. It's very intuitive. Aperture is not as good in that area, in my opinion. But, I know plenty of people who use it exclusively and RAVE about it.

    I'd say get the free trial of both (make sure to do the LR3 Beta) and see which fits you best.

  2. Thanks. For now I'm just plugging along in iPhoto. After combining my two libraries it seems even slower at times. Maybe if I get way more Christmas money that I expect I'll give Aperture and Lightroom a try :D

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