Having Lightroom problems, is Aperture 'better'?

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fixedimage

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I've had LR3 for about 4 or 5 months or so now and although I really like some parts of it, others drive me insane so I'm wondering if there's another option and never having used Aperture I wonder if it might suit me better.

One of my main gripes with LR is how slow it can be to generate thumbnails when I'm browsing my images, specifically the ones that are on my external drives.

The other is that I lost a lot of edited work recently when I shifted images fom my Imac harddrive to my external drives.
I only ever keep a max of 6 months worth of images on my Imac's hard drive - backed up onto an external hd with Time Machine.
In January I used LR to shift all of my images from June-Dec 2010 onto two external drives - one copy of everything on each drive - as I used to do with Bridge.
While the raw files moved fine I lost all the edited versions of the moved images that I had put in collections.
These are possibly still floating around somewhere but I'm buggered if I can find them.

Am I just doing things wrong or is there something better out there?
 
LR should be able to move images fine. I do exactly what you describe - keep recent images on the desktop hard drive and move the archive off, in my case to a network device. You should be able to just move the images in LR and all the settings, virtual copies, collections, etc will not be affected. Methods that won't work correctly are:

1)Exporting the files to the new location and then removing the originals for the HD - you may, depending on save settings, keep you edits, but flags, virtual copies and collections will be gone

2) Moving the files with an external program and then re-importing them (although if you move externally and then re-link that will work)

As for render speed, yes LR can be slow, but I doubt Aperture will be faster. It's the main limitation of this kind of software. You can change the length of time LR keeps the preview files stored locally after it renders them. If you increase this obviously more images will have a local preview already generated and thus display quickly, but it uses disk space. What I tend to do is if I know I'm need to look through a set of images on an external drive I open the folder, highlight everything, and tell LR to render previews of them all. Go and do something else and when you come back you should have a nice, quick to browse, set of images. If it's lot of pictures, and you need 1:1 previews rendered (to judge critical focus for example) do it overnight.
 
If I need to move large quantities of images from one drive to another I tend to copy them to the new location outside Lightroom rather than move them with Lightroom . For me this ensures nothing is lost in transit. I then right click on the appropriate folder within the Lightroom Library module and select "Update Folder Location" and point to the new destination. Lightroom then updates it's database. Then once I've checked there are no "?" on any of the images I delete the source.

OK I know Lightroom itself can move files to a new location itself, However in the past I have had problems when moving large numbers of files. On one occasion Lightroom actually froze and aborted the process half way through. Fortunately I was able to recover from this ( That's why back ups are a good idea), but since then I have used the copy and "update" method.
 
Chappers said:
If I need to move large quantities of images from one drive to another I tend to copy them to the new location outside Lightroom rather than move them with Lightroom . For me this ensures nothing is lost in transit. I then right click on the appropriate folder within the Lightroom Library module and select "Update Folder Location" and point to the new destination. Lightroom then updates it's database. Then once I've checked there are no "?" on any of the images I delete the source.
Click to expand...

I do it this way and never lost anything on windows or mac..;)
 
When you're looking at the image in Library you're actually looking at a preview file which is stored in the same location as your catalog file by default, so the actual location of the original shouldn't matter. If you're talking about the Develop module then Lr does have to partially generate the preview file, so the original file location will matter

I'm assuming you are generating standard sized previews in advance? You need to ensure that you have the correct size set for your previews (Catalog Settings - File Handling), otherwise Lr will be forced to regenerate the previews in real time, which takes an age, especially on an external drive.

If you've moved the files outwith Lr (a bad idea) then it's worth re-rendering the previews (Library - Previews) to ensure that Lr hasn't lost track of them.

Hope this helps
 
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