I been using iPhoto for a few years right now and I like it a lot. Before using iPhoto I was manually marking who was in each picture and where it was taken, so when I saw iPhoto could do it almost automatically I bought a mac. Yes, iPhoto was a big part of buying a mac.
Some time afterwards, I got a DSLR, starting shooting in raw, and as usual, shooting a lot. I rarely remove pictures. I don’t see a reason, my hard drives get bigger faster than I take pictures. My collection has around 35000 pics, at least, and lot’s of raw too. This is not what iPhoto is designed for.
I looked around and Apple’s Aperture is the only pro photo management software that keeps all the features I need and like from iPhoto (faces and places mostly). Since the latest iPhoto is not very robust (it actually crashed on me once and I had to restore everything from backups), I decided to migrate to Aperture.
Something that surprised me about Aperture is that it doesn’t prompt me to delete the pictures after importing. I searched on the interwebs about this and apparently, it’s a feature. When people asked how to delete pictures, people replied: “Don’t! If you delete pictures after importing, your pictures are in only one place, if something happens to them, they are lost.”
One should be careful when getting advice on how to use an Apple product as the Apple fanboys will defend whatever Apple believes we should do even if it makes no sense and kills kittens in the process. But this actually makes sense. I had my computer crash during the import procedure and take all the pics with it. I’m glad iPhoto didn’t get to delete the pictures in the camera when that happened. Both Aperture and iPhoto are capable of ignoring duplicates when importing and I would expect any other useful picture management program to do the same.
I decided to embrace the workflow, I bought a bigger memory card for my camera and now I don’t delete the pics from the camera until a couple of days later, when my several backups solutions managed to backup the new pictures.
Another reason to do it this way, and delete pictures by formatting the memory card, is that it’s the only way to ensure there are no extraneous files on the card, taking space, that neither the camera nor any program need or understand.
