Mar 11 2010
“It just works!” Except for when it doesn’t.
Take a fresh installation of Snow Leopard, Aperture 2, Logic Studio 9 and everything else that you have. Download and install all available updates. Then try to import around 10,000 RAW photos into Aperture. And experience crash after crash after crash.
Basically, that’s what I did and every time Aperture reaches the 1,100 picture counter, it aborts with a long epic failure message. I cannot import my photos, and it doesn’t matter if I try the “import folders as projects” option or the other import option.
Aperture plain and simple crashes every time.
I cannot import my photographs and basically Aperture is now a useless waste of space on my disk drive. And with it, the entire fucking Mac is a waste of space, because Aperture is the #1 reason why there is a Mac Pro beneath my desk in the first place.
I’m beyond being just pissed. I paid a five digit sum for this whole Apple crap. It’s the most expensive computer system that I ever owned – and it also is the most unreliable and unsatisfying one that I ever used. The Mac Pro is loud, Apple has already artificially made it obsolete (no 64-bit OS X kernel, no official 64-Bit Boot Camp support), Snow Leopard is a compatibility disaster and now even Aperture refuses to work.
I don’t want to pay all that money to get a Lightroom license for Windows and to get my existing Adobe for OS X licenses transferred. And I will certainly not give Apple any more of my money: Maybe I wouldn’t have that problem with Aperture 3. But why should I care? I no longer fuel Steve Jobs’ money engine. I also don’t really want to fuel Bill Gates’ engine, but in all honesty and with all the experiences that I had to made, I must come to the conclusion that I have always made a living in Windows land, and that since NT 4, Windows has become a reliable platform for all purposes.
Well, haven’t I been there before? Yes, but it’s hard to dump something that has cost you so much financially. And I do not like to admit defeat and failure or that I have been making some wrong decisions over a couple of years, even if they had only something to do with unimportant (but costly) computer crap.
Anyway. This is it. I’ll put as much as possible of that shit on eBay now.
2 Responses to ““It just works!” Except for when it doesn’t.”
I’m sorry you are having so many problems. I haven’t had any problems with Aperture 3 on an older iMac. It’s possible your graphics card is out of date. I don’t know the specifics of it, but there are some older cards that won’t deal with 64-bit. First thing, try switching to 32-bit mode.
The other thing that caught my eye was it blows up on the same image. It’s possible that image is corrupt. Read this article: http://aperture.maccreate.com/2010/03/08/aperture-3-crashing-look-for-corrupt-images/
Thanks, Thomas. I was on a business trip over the last days and didn’t check my blog, that’s why this response is so late.
I manually sorted out more than 1,000 broken JPGs that neither Quick Look nor Photoshop wanted to open, so I presume that Aperture 2 exported some garbage files that were still in its database for some unknown reasons.
Once those broken images were sorted out, Aperture no longer crashed during the import. However, it’s still a pain to manually create folders sorted by date. I just don’t like those smart folders which are just views on the database; I prefer “real” sorting.
After not having used my Mac Pro for several days now, the very first thing that annoyed me was its noise level. I’m really thinking about buying a fanless SilentMaxx PC now and maybe turn it into a Hackintosh. I’d prefer to use Linux, but in all likelihood that’s not feasible for everything that I do. I’m an IT guy, but there are a few things like Aperture that cannot be painlessly substituted by the Linux ecosystem.
Well, we’ll see.
Thanks for your post!