14 DAY TRIAL // A number of outraged Aperture users have taken to the Apple Discussions forums to complain about Aperture 3, one of the worst Apple software updates they’ve ever performed, going by their posts. Early Aperture 3 adopters suggest there are issues with the new version of Apple’s professional photography app. However, many also claim there may be issues with their existing libraries (corrupt files, etc.), not so much with the program itself.
“I have installed Aperture 3 update on 15000 photos aperture 2 library,” Xavier Cusset writes over at Apple Discussions. “Crash systematically at startup. I finally found a workaround (to force 32 bits mode); run endlessly on face recognition; Stopped faces; run endlessly on a mysterious background task labelled library processing (stuck on item 2 on 412); impossible to stop in spite of the command; crash immediately when I try a simple action as opening a project,” he explains, tracing back his steps.
Another disappointed user chimes in saying, “It's the worst Apple upgrade I've ever had, Aperture 3 is now unusable to me.” Discoteca claims, “Upgrading didn't work at all it just got stuck processing, so I tried a fresh Aperture 3 library and imported my Aperture 2 projects 1 by 1, this worked better but it's now gone unusable again and stuck processing.”
Poster Jarod62 doesn’t seem to have had much luck either, although by the time we got to his post, we could see that issues seemed to be triggered by the “upgrade” process, which includes transferring over everything from Aperture 2 to Aperture 3. “I completely agree,” he writes. “It's a scandalous release. I wonder how it was possible that the Aperture team has not found these problems during the software development or in the (private) beta testing program.”
Abbstrack aims to put out the flames saying, “I believe this is a corrupt database issue rather than a problem with ap3.” He offers a link to another thread where this subject is debated.
“I've had nothing but good luck so far, so I suspect there's something else causing the issue,” poster William Lloyd adds. “It is possible there's an issue with the library,” he suggests.
Finally, James calms spirits down noting that, “Apple could [simply] be more explicit about the care and feeding of large database files. Most of what I learned is from personal experience with Aperture 2 libraries becoming corrupt and figuring out ways to recover them.” “Many forget that Aperture is a powerful professional level application and requires more attention and commitment than something like iPhoto or other applications that don't have extensive databases,” his analysis goes. “Perhaps Apple should take note of the difficulties some are having and be more informative,” the (seemingly) more experienced customer points out.
Softpedia agrees with James, although every one of these commenters seems to have overlooked the fact that Apple’s Support section contains close to 40 Support documents focusing on potential issues with Aperture 3 and Aperture 3 upgrades. One of the first such documents posted over at http://www.apple.com/support/aperture/ is actually entitled “Tips on upgrading an Aperture 2 library to Aperture 3.” It sure sounds like a good starting point for those eager to upgrade properly.
Update: while we agree with the last-cited person in this piece, we also have to credit Softpedia reader "Numpty", who commented: "[...]Precisely because it's a powerful professional level application, it ought to have gone through much more rigourous QA and be as bulletproof as humanly possible before the public get their hands on it. Home users can afford a bit of downtime sorting out the occasional hassle, but professionals are far less tolerant of such annoyances. The greater amount of money they're spending on your products needs to be treated with a great deal of respect if you want them to keep spending it in future," he argues.
Indeed, there are many ways to look at this situation. This is one of them. On one hand, it is considered a person really knows what they're doing, when using a professional-grade app like Aperture. On the other hand, creative professionals needn't waste any time figuring out the underpinnings of their software applications, making it imperative for Apple to solve these issues for them, thus also justifying the price it charges for its solutions.