Relative Slowness in the Digital Age

By Timothy R. Butler | Apr 13, 2010 at 15:48:33

The digital age is weird – twenty years ago, organizing a few thousand photographs was a daunting project that could take hours to do right. Today, I have been reorganizing 61,000 digital photos, or, rather, the computer is organizing them while I do something else. When it finishes after a day’s worth of work, it will have my photos far better organized than I would have had I spent exponentially more time doing so by hand. I wish it would hurry up.

I am an aspiring photographer. Perhaps I am not all that good at it, but I enjoy taking pictures with my digital SLR. In recent years, I have been utilizing my camera’s RAW capture capabilities so that I can easily do post processing without degrading picture quality. This means my pictures take up a lot of space, especially since I snap 10,000 or more photos a year.

Over the last six months, I have been weaning myself off a desktop computer and onto a faster, but storage-cramped MacBook Pro. Coming from a Macintosh desktop which has a 750 GB hard disk as its primary drive – and another drive available as a scratch disk – means I have to be a little more deliberate about what I store internally than I have in the past.

To accomplish my goal, I bought a copy of Apple’s Aperture photo management tool. Previously, I organized my photos in iPhoto, a program that has saved me a huge amount of time in the six years I have used it. Prior to my iPhoto conversion, I managed my photos manually, in a massive collection of folders. They were not quite as disorganized as the average shoebox full of photographs, but close. IPhoto took my disorganized mess and within a couple of hours had transformed them into a very usable, decently organized collection.

Nevertheless, iPhoto has its limitations. In particular, without third party add-ons, it can utilize only one library and that library and all of the photos it contains need to be accessible whenever the library is accessed. If the photos are sitting on another drive at home, you can forget trying to examine your library for a useful picture while on the road.

Aperture offers a more sophisticated solution, aimed at “prosumers” and “professionals” – or anyone who has fooled himself into thinking he fits into one of those categories. The “killer app,” to slightly misapply the phrase, of Aperture is that it allows one to store lower resolution, lower quality previews of images on the internal drive while offloading the full quality “masters” to an external storage device. These previews are actually good enough for many uses.

This is perfect in my book: I can cut the amount of that limited resource of internal disk spaced used significantly (though, given the way Aperture does this, not quite as much as I would like), while still allowing myself access to my photo library when I am not at home.

Moving 61,000 images into Aperture, though, was an arduous task. Not for me, but for my MacBook. Given that the library contains about 300 gigabytes of photos and each one needs to be processed multiple times to create Aperture’s collection of thumbnails and “previews,” it took many hours to import the first time. But, soon enough, the deed was done and I was ready to go. While I have not come close to figuring out how best to utilize all of Aperture’s power yet, it was humming along doing what I wanted it to do.

But, now it is processing again.

You see, after stalling on buying Aperture for years, I finally gave in and bought Aperture 2 just a month before Aperture 3 was announced. I had waited for months, thinking Aperture 3 might be announced before I bought into the program, because I was hoping Apple would add GPS track log importing. Track log importing is a nifty little function that allows one to take a standalone GPS unit and merge its log of where one has been with the photos taken using a GPS-less camera such as my Canon EOS 40D.

Apple did add the feature, but only after I had purchased Aperture 2 and gotten all of my photos settled in there. My goal is to have my computer organize my photos every possible way I could want to locate them, so, grudgingly, I shelled out the money for the Aperture upgrade.

With the upgrade, Aperture had to rebuild the library. Having completed that, it is now busy chugging along on a multi-hour process of finding faces amongst my photos. Sorting this many photos by the people in the photos would have taken years by hand, but looks like it will take four or five hours in Aperture.

Funny thing is, I find myself feeling impatient thinking it will take that long. I wish it would hurry up.

Timothy R. Butler is Editor-in-Chief of Open for Business.